


Chronicles of the Wolf

by scalesandfishnails



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age - Various Authors, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Angst and Romance, Angst and Tragedy, Dark Fantasy, Dragon Age Lore, Eventual Romance, F/M, Heavy Angst, NSFW Art, Possibly Unrequited Love, Romance, Sexual Content, Tragic Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-04-21 12:34:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 25
Words: 55,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22074631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scalesandfishnails/pseuds/scalesandfishnails
Summary: The elders warned me of Fen'Harel; how he hunted children who did not behave.  Who were more wolf than elf.  I did not believe them.(but I did)(and I do)
Relationships: Alistair/Zevran Arainai/Female Cousland, Female Lavellan/Solas, Fen'Harel | Solas/Female Lavellan, Zevran Arainai/Female Lavellan, Zevran Arainai/Lavellan
Comments: 41
Kudos: 60





	1. I.

“_Elgara vallas, da'len  
Melava somniar  
Mala taren aravas  
Ara ma'desen melar_

_Iras ma ghilas, da'len  
Ara ma'nedan ashir  
Dirthara lothlenan'as  
Bal emma mala dir_

_Tel'enfenim, da'len  
Irassal ma ghilas  
Ma garas mir renan  
Ara ma'athlan vhenas  
Ara ma'athlan vhenas_”

\- a traditional Dalish lullaby

She received the blood writing, and in its cursive, found that she was grown. It was a sudden change, an abrupt one – one that came with little guidance or sympathy. Niamh had chosen the symbol of Andruil, even though she had never been allowed to be the huntress she desired to be. Those blood-racing escapades had been torn from her the moment her other, innate abilities were recognised. Instead of her romps through the forest, Niamh had been forced into tutorship with the Keeper of her clan, Deshanna Istimaethoriel. Regardless, as a stroke of rebellion, she had Andruil’s bow wrought unto her skin.

Beneath the blood ink was the spattering of freckles, little amber torches buried into milk-stone skin. They had been her _vallaslin_ before ever she had been old enough to sit the stool – a mark of her childhood, brazenly multiplied by the sun. As she studied her face in a warped glass mirror, a sheathe of bronze clutched tightly into her palm, she recognised the impudent, freckle-faced girl beneath Andruil’s stamp of womanhood. Everything had changed, and yet little else had. Her messy hair was still tamed into the same draping side braid over one shoulder, brown as the chestnuts she would sometimes find among the fallen leaves. Her eyes were still the colour of a cold wintry sky, harsh and aloof, severing the friendships she would have nurtured amongst her clan had she been more open. Welcoming.

It did not help her that she was the _wolf girl_. The one of tall tales. When she had still been allowed to hunt, she had returned one day with the conviction that she had come upon the Dread Wolf himself. She could still remember the hulking beast, the fiery ruby eyes. He had stolen her breath away, even though the sight of Fen’Harel should have struck great fear and remorse into her. That was, at least, what Deshanna had told her. She had said the Dread Wolf hunted children who did not behave; who were more wolf than elf. _You are not a she-wolf_, Deshanna had chided her. _One day, you will be my First._

Niamh still wondered what it would be like to be wolf, running free, sinking teeth into those prey who would belittle her and call her liar.

A spasm of laughter drifted out from the clan’s large bonfire. They were celebrating the coming of age of their children – the fresh blood writing on their cheery, inspired faces. She, in turn, had kept to the very edge of that golden glow. She balanced the bronze mirror upon her bony knees, watching with a peculiar sadness. Though she wore Andruil’s mark upon her features, she did not feel connected to the Huntress. She did not feel the blessing of her gods as all her peers had appeared to do. They joined hands around the billowing smoke and danced and spun, clapping their hands and heels to a rolling drumbeat. A part of her wished to carelessly join, but she feared that when she did, the crowds would part away. The celebration would be cut short from the presence of the she-wolf. The cursed girl.

Deshanna sat beside her. Niamh had not noticed her moving through the evening’s blueness. They were silent – on Niamh’s part stubbornly ignoring, and on the Keeper’s part serenely watching.

“You are brooding,” Deshanna said at last. “This is not an evening for you to be brooding.”

“It’s an evening for me to do whatever I like.” Niamh detested the precocious tone to her voice before the sentence had fully closed itself. She still sounded a child, and acted one. Sensing the young woman’s self-loathing, Deshanna settled her glance more fully on Niamh. The Keeper had eyes that would rival the warmth of the sun, and the presence of crow’s-feet that were testament to her age and wisdom. With that wisdom, she knew better than to reach out and console Niamh physically.

“I see the pain of the blood writing has not blunted your tongue.”

Niamh frowned. She had told herself she would steel her lips when she sat for the inking. That she wouldn’t let loose a single whimper. She would not have been deemed worthy of it otherwise. Of course, she had left with tears stinging the corners of her eyes. Perhaps that too had dampened her elation at finally becoming a woman.

“Everyone acts as though I’m supposed to have changed. That I’ll miraculously come to the fire wiser and greater.”

“Everyone?” Deshanna questioned. The firelight warmed the brown tones of her skin, and shone her silver tresses to appear a molten gold. “I have not seen you speak to a single soul, _ma’dharlin_.”

_Pup_. That had been the Keeper’s somewhat derisive pet name for her since the infamous wolf incident. Niamh stared down at the bronze plate on her knees.

“Will it always be like this?” Niamh blurted out. Even as she asked it, she wasn’t aware what she fully meant. Would she always be an outcast, even though she had prevailed against the agony of the _vallaslin_? Would she always be doomed to be Keeper’s First, while her peers led their lives free and wild like wolf cubs in their own right? Would she always be haunted by the Dread Wolf’s many eyes, reminiscent of the stars that pierced through from the sky? Deshanna could not read her mind, so she could not immediately answer. When she did, her husky voice had softened with consideration.

“I am sorry that you are suffering. No-one expects you to find your way so soon. It is difficult to shed the ways of our childhood, but that is our journey to take, both good and bad. As is the _vallaslin_ ours to earn, no matter the pain.”

It was not meant to be condescending, but it stung all the same. It whispered that she should forget her childish daydreams. That she should accept her duty, not rebel against it. She straightened to her feet. No-one looked at her, the lanky and thin girl of clan Lavellan. They were too busy revelling, too busy being hopeful for the future where she dreaded it. She wanted to scream, or howl. She wanted to howl until the stars were shaken from the sky; her voice was bigger than her bones.

“You are trapped,” Deshanna said. “You hunger for things that no-one can give you. You are a she-wolf, _ma’dharlin_, but that does not mean you either bite or howl. Wolves make a pack, and the pack take care of one another.”

“Yet no-one else here is a wolf. They mock me for it. Years ago it happened, but I’m still cursed. I’m the girl who fell beneath the Dread Wolf’s many eyes. They won’t even look at me.”

“Can you blame them? All our lives, we are taught of Fen’Harel’s sins. His treachery. It was an ill omen, but nothing more than that. They will grow past their prejudices, and you will soon forget that you ever saw the beast.”

Niamh paused. She turned to stare down at her elder. “You believe me?” Her voice wavered. “You’ve believed me all this time?” Deshanna smiled, more a gesture of weariness than one of sympathy.

“I believe that we are haunted by the history that made us. I believe that in the forests, the shadow of the Dread Wolf wanders, searching for his redemption. He will not find it in you, _ma’dharlin_. You will not make for his feast of sorrows.”

There was a curious ripple deep within Niamh’s chest. The relief of being believed, finally, or anger that the Keeper had never once divulged such a vital morsel of information. If she had known, even just vaguely, that she was not wholly isolated – that Deshanna truly supported her … and yet, she did not notice when the glow of the firelight faded. She only glanced up when the laughter of revelry had transformed itself into horrified murmurs.

Where once wood smoke had fluttered into the sky, strange, translucent gauze seemed to emanate. Over the dead logs, Niamh thought that she made out figures. Her mother, she thought. Deshanna’s lover, the next, passed from illness that had briefly rippled through the clan. Other faces she did not recognise. The bronze plate fell from her fingertips, its descent muffled by the chilled ambience.

“What is this?” she asked her Keeper. When she looked, however, Deshanna’s features had grown drawn and frightened. Then, she noted that the gathering were all looking to _her_ – the she-wolf, the cursed child. One of them pointed to her, Mythal’s _vallaslin_ fresh over her tan features.

“The wolf pup has doused the fire with her magic! What are you doing, _banal’ras_?”

The expressions of stunned fear, uncertainty, slowly morphed into confusion and resentment. In that moment, Niamh did not feel Andruil’s strength emanate from her cheeks. She did not feel calm centre on the point of arrow that had been inked into her skin. As her eyes darted back over the fire, she imagined she saw a great wolf head nestled amidst the logs. A myriad of crimson eyes, before she told herself it must be the dying embers. Deshanna grabbed her elbow, pinching hard. When her reverie broke, so did the fire suddenly flare back into existence. The heat and force of it blushed the tip of her nose, and several of her peers leapt back with disconcerted cries.

“_No_,” Niamh stammered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.” No matter the words that tumbled from her lips, however, the revelry had indeed come to an abrupt and hostile end. Like earlier, she felt tears prick at the corners of her eyes. When she looked to Deshanna for aid, the older woman’s visage appeared older and colder.

“Perhaps it is time for you to rest, _ma’dharlin_. The day has been long.”

It was a dismissal, no matter the softness of the blow. Niamh wrenched her arm away. For a brief, flickering moment, it had felt as though her mentor was on her side. That she had finally accepted her pupil for the many eyes that haunted her. It was in that moment of loose guard, perhaps, that her magic had betrayed her. And now, it felt as though her very own Keeper had.

She turned from the gathering, shame burning the skin of her bare shoulders, where her freckles lay undisturbed by the blood writing. When she was sure she had advanced into the shadow, far enough away from the reach of the light, her flat chest erupted into sobs; her aching face dissolved into tears.

She was still a girl, after all – the dread she-pup.


	2. II.

“ _… The mage was strong. Even I could sense it. It was terrifying. There is no way the child could break through. She doesn't even have training. So long as she stays inside, everything will be all right._

_No one will ever know._”

\- Lord D’Onterre’s journal

_Spy._ It was a long way down from Keeper’s First, as far as titles and aspirations went. Not that Niamh had harboured any delusions that Deshanna would keep to her lofty promises. In the years that separated her from the inking of her _vallaslin_, the she-wolf had only served to strengthen the divide between herself and the rest of her clan. No matter how she trained, they considered her magic wild and uncontrollable. No matter how much she kept to herself and spoke of mundane things, they considered her cursed by Fen’Harel.

Now, they had sent her to the Divine Conclave, to _spy_. That was what she was good for, where all others turned their heads away from dealing with the _shemlen_. Perhaps she had been an outcast in her clan, but here, she stuck out even more.

Camps dotted the crevices in the Frostback Mountains, like dots of dried blood leading up and around the Temple of Andraste. The name was funny to speak, curious to roll over her tongue after the likes of Andruil, Mythal, Fen’Harel. She witnessed banners that she did not recognise, half drowned in snow and frost, and she heard words and accents so unfamiliar to her, she wondered if she had fallen into a different world altogether. Now, she learned, the temple was named for sacred ashes, though some of the shemlen elders used the names interchangeably. Once, she overheard, it had been a ruin. When the Chantry had rediscovered it, it had been raised back into some form of sanctity, and now bore witness to the conflict of dozens of politics.

She found that she pitied the old building. If it was so venerable in the _shemlen_’s eyes, she wondered why they did not harbour more respect in its shadow. If she squabbled and threw her weight around as much as the gathering did here, already clashing heads before the Conclave had officially begun, Keeper Deshanna would have slapped her upside the head. She would have deserved it.

To her credit, Niamh Lavellan had grown. She was still stick-thin, pale against her freckles and her _vallaslin_, but she carried her shoulders staunchly held back, and she made use of her off-putting gaze to brook no question. Rather than sneak and spy, she strode openly through the fields of white as though she belonged. The camps were insular, brewing trouble with others in their wake. A lone Dalish elf was little threat, though perhaps a reminder of the turbulent times.

In between eavesdropping, however, she learned that she was not wholly alone in being an outcast. The recently ascended Inquisition was given a wide berth despite their supposedly holy presence. Solitary figures darted around the edge of their camp, either scouts or curious passers-by. One such among them was an elf, his head cleanly shorn, his garb somewhat thin and cold for the weather provided to them. In contrast, Niamh had brought as many furs with her as she could. A silver fennec’s backside warmed her cheek as she watched him curiously from between the outer tents. She was not alone. Those of the Inquisition watched him just as warily, and some scrambled to their feet to spread word of the lurkers – including herself, no doubt. As she turned to make herself scarce, their eyes met across the distance. He smiled.

She had managed to plunge her calves a good distance through the snow when he caught up to her, infuriatingly effortless in his strides. If the conditions troubled him, he gave no sign of it. If he noted her bad temper, he did not temper himself in turn. “_Aneth ara_,” he called, and she bristled. He was no Dalish – that much was clear. No _vallaslin_ marked his passage into adulthood, and he appeared too clean and fresh-faced otherwise. A city elf – the ones who had been torn away from their roots. She had never met one before, but she felt an inherited distaste for them, one that she did not have time to question.

“What do you want?” she called back over her shoulder. She realised that he was making easy passage of the snow by using his staff, pulling himself forward with its momentum as it plunged merrily into the white banks. She wondered if he too was a mage.

“Nothing. Only conversation, should you deem me worthy of it.”

Flowery language, and a smile that did not quite reach his eyes. He was studying her, curious – maybe, in turn, he had never met a Dalish elf before. Niamh had no interest in being his first study. She turned her head back forward and quickened her pace.

“I’ve no interest in conversation, _seth’lin_.”

“No? Is that why you lurk at the edge of their camp, like a pup left without its dinner?”

It was the wording he used that stopped her. That dreaded word of _pup_. She spun on the spot so quickly, the cold rattled her teeth. He watched her with jaded amusement, both hands wrapped around the body of his staff as he too came to a stop. Niamh was instantly uneasy. How long had he been watching her? Longer than she had been watching him?

“Good,” he stated. “We can talk.”

Infuriation returned. She studied him as blatantly as he studied her – the unblemished pale skin, the hooded and watchful eyes. A smile seemed perpetually in place, sardonic, almost mocking. _Or pitying_, she thought. It confused her what this hermit would want with her, but he made no secret of his intentions.

“You represent the Dalish, do you not?”

Her brows drew together. She cursed herself for not having the sure-footed stance. It seemed her calves sunk deeper into the snow the more she lingered.

“In a way,” she answered, guardedly. He tilted up his chin, then nodded.

“I’ve not seen others of your kind. You’ve been sent alone.”

“You have sharp eyes, I’ll give you that. No Dalish worth their salt would come here in droves – not amongst the _shemlen_.”

“The _quick children_,” the lone elf intoned. He smiled, as though sharing a jest with one only he could see. “In the shadow of such history, we are all but children, are we not? Some more than others.”

“If you mean to say the Conclave is a children’s squabble, then I would say you aren’t far off the mark.”

“No. I refer to the temple. It has withstood many years. I saw the way you looked upon it. You feel it as well.”

Her guard abruptly rose, and Niamh took a step back. “How long have you been following me, _seth’lin_?”

“Not very long. And my blood is no lesser than your own. I would prefer to be referred to by my name.”

“Which is?”

He inclined his head, a spark of triumph in his gaze that she had asked at all. “Solas.”

“_Pride._ A fitting name.” She turned from him again, no longer interested in flattering his curiosity. If he imagined her some pup or plaything for his cloaked intent, he would find himself sorely disappointed. To her chagrin, however, Solas kept pace. They crested the next snowy hill together, uncovering another set of camps, all trailing to the base of the rock upon which the Temple of Sacred Ashes stood. He gazed upon it, and had she not reminded herself it was but a building to honour a _shem_ woman, she would have thought there was affection in his gaze.

“What is yours?” he asked. “Your name?”

“That is mine to keep, Solas.”

She imagined his smile might have turned genuine – that he looked upon her with a familiarity that made her unease grow all the more in depth. He took a step closer, and she inhaled to brace herself. Fight or flight, and she was more likely to deal with the former. She could feel the energy buzzing between her fingertips already, though her own staff remained bundled beneath one arm, the less to call unfavourable attention to herself. His eyes roamed, and the smile softened.

“Be careful, _ma’dharlin_. It will not be so quiet for long.”

He turned away, and she reached out, her gloved fingers stiffening in the chill air. “Why did you call me that?” she snapped. “Who are you? Did Deshanna send you?”

His head canted just so, his profile noble against the dying light. No longer could she make out the facet of his smile, though she could imagine it still. “That is my secret to keep.”

She did not stop him leaving. She could not think of a good reason to. His endearments were coincidence at best, deeply unsettling at worst. There would be no good in pursuing him – pursuing _any_ flight of fancy. Niamh had learnt that at a young age, and suffered the consequences for her naivety.

No. What sat heavy in her stomach was the implication he had cloaked in pretty confusion. _It will not be so quiet for long_. For the first time, Niamh regarded the Conclave not as a child’s squabble, but as something of great weight and consequence. As she turned back to cast her eye over the nameless, snow-shrouded encampments, turmoil bubbled in the base of her stomach.

There was something in the air here. Something she had not felt since the evening she had wrought her clan’s flames to ghosts.

She feared what it prophesied. She feared what it would mean for her.


	3. III.

“_Then Sylaise the Hearthkeeper came, and gave us fire and taught us how to feed it with wood. June taught us to fashion bows and arrows and knives, so that we could hunt. We learned to cook the flesh of the creatures we hunted over Sylaise's fire, and we learned to clothe ourselves in their furs and skins. And the People were no longer cold and hungry._”

\- Gisharel, Keeper of the Ralaferin clan

Flickers of emerald licked beneath her eyelids. There was heat in her spine, in the palms of her hands. Sweat slicked down the dark hairs that fell over her brow. She was at once aware of her circumstance, yet unconscious regarding it. She witnessed the same scene unfold before her. The Divine Justinia V watched on as a pulsing tear in the fabric of reality sealed shut before Niamh’s splayed fingers. A faint and sad smile twitched the woman’s lips. She faded before the elf could reach for her too.

Somewhere in that repetitive inferno of fever and nightmare, the Dalish shot up on the hard mattress, clutching at the thin fabric that made up her blanket. She was in a place that she did not recognise, instantly. Niamh knew well the tents that made up a Dalish camp – the earth, the green, the sun and the moon. Here, the trees had been mangled to make up the walls. The animals had been skinned for rugs too pristine to be true. She inched out a leg, her weight wavering from her distressed weakness. When she dug her toes into the thick fluff, she knew her surroundings to be real.

She was, however, not in her armour. Someone had dressed her into a slip, too thin for the cold outside, but merciful to the brunt of her fever. She ran the back of her hand over her brow, and felt the uneasy pinprick of realisation that she could remember little. Only then, through her lashes, did she notice the glow of green still realised in the cusp of her palm. A tear, like in the fabric of reality, but now knit into her own skin.

The Dalish howled.

It did not take long for dozens of figures she did not recognise to fill up the space between log wall and log wall, as though they had all been waiting their turn to advance upon her premises. The one foremost was a harried-looking man with a bald pate and draping goatee – a _shem_, clearly overworked, and clearly as distrustful of Niamh as she was of him. As he advanced, she promptly scrambled back on the mattress until her back was to the wall. She thought she might even have bared her teeth.

“Just my luck,” the _shem_ said. “I’ve got a rabid one.”

Niamh had worked many years to build up a semblance of composure and reserve that would prove her peers wrong concerning her – well, disposition. All of that careful self-grooming flew out the door from which they had all come through, as did the dregs of her ill health. Several armoured men (she could feel their pauldrons digging into her abdomen) hauled her back onto the thin and bruising bed before she could effectively claw the _shem_’s eyes out. When she had been settled back, she was aware enough of their garb to recognise them – they were men of the Inquisition. She could recall their style of armour from when she’d lurked around their camp.

Like clockwork, then, other details fell into place. The strong, harsh cheek and jawline of a human woman, torchlight glimmering off her short-cropped dark hair. Niamh’s arms working stiffly through the cold as her staff spun in her hands, a dark and hungry energy coalescing around those who advanced upon her. And those … those had been demons, hadn’t they? She shivered, pulling her blanket up to her chin. Back to a pup, then, the she-wolf went.

“Where am I?” she demanded. When the _shem_ felt comfortable enough to advance once more, she snapped, “_Don’t_ touch me.”

The commotion had stirred more beings to fill up the mouth of her door, ogling her as though she was – well, as though she was an elf in human lands. The dregs of bystanders were peeling back, however. Making way for a taller frame, a scowling face – a far more tired and harried-looking _shem_, which made Niamh consider if any of them aged well at all. His armour was far more eye-catching, not melting into the Inquisition colours. Furs bunched around his shoulders, and locks of pale hair drifted over a tired brow. Promptly, the soldiers who had been cornering her bed stood to attention.

“What in the _world_ – ” This new arrival paused, his gaze falling upon Niamh. His eyes were shadowed enough to be brown, but she thought she caught flecks of green in the irides. “Oh. You’re awake.”

She didn’t know how to answer. In truth, she was confused. Her instinct was to push them all away, but her memories told her that she had helped. That they had fought together. When someone fought with her, she respected them. She watched their back. The new arrival, sensing her trepidation, turned abruptly and raised his voice.

“_Out, all of you!_” What words followed were drowned out by the sudden surge of noise and haste as her newfound audience cleared the room, leaving behind only the soldiers, himself, and the _shem_ with the goatee. Spotting the latter, the pale-haired man sighed. “I think it would be best if you – ”

“She’s not yet well, commander. A fever at worst, which would explain her being out of her mind – ”

She bared her teeth again – even hissed – and the _shem_’s brows rode up. He dragged his feet backwards, holding up his hands.

“On second thought, she’s all yours.”

Just the four of them, then – the two Inquisition soldiers, their supposed commander, and Niamh in her slip. She refused to cower in her bed; didn’t even want to consider it. Instead, she straightened, pushed her shoulders back, and glared up at the commander. He scratched the back of his head, his will seeping out of him the longer she stared daggers through him.

“I suppose you might not remember,” he began, then backtracked. “No doubt you want an explanation.”

She stared. He flinched, and briefly she felt the stab of guilt, then that same confusion from before. Finally, she lowered her gaze, sourly observing her folded hands over the blanket. When the silence stretched between them, the commander took a tentative step forward.

“There are those who will be able to explain the circumstances better than I ever could. I won’t ask you to trust me, but … have mercy on my men.”

There was a touch of self-deprecating humour. An attempt to ease the tension. Niamh glanced up through her lashes, measuring him. For a man of relatively impressive build, blade to hand, he could have intimidated her. As commander, he could have ordered his men to drag her to her feet. Against her will, she felt a touch of gratitude, and a touch of sympathy, toward him. When she spoke, her words came out hoarse, rusted from disuse.

“My clothes.”

He blinked. She thought he even blushed. He turned his back prematurely, then circled back around. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll let you get dressed. Your clothes – your _armour_ – were left in the chest there.” He gestured to the otherwise insignificant trove at the foot of the bed. After a heartbeat, he added, “We will wait for you outside.”

“Thank you.”

The commander seemed bewildered. Perhaps a Dalish elf had never thanked him before. His features had settled into a faint and befuddled smile by the time he had left the small hut, his soldiers following behind. They were a little more blatant with their curious stares, but hurried on well enough when Niamh bared her teeth once more.

She took the time to dress as time to explore her body – the aches she couldn’t remember, the bruises that felt like nothing at all. She remembered splices of scenery, then – the snow that tufted between her fingertips and threatened to slide the staff out of her hand. Her knees crunching into stone as she lost her balance. A pale woman with blood-red hair, her hood shadowing her cold stare. That emerald tear in the fabric, the Inquisition’s soldiers behind her … a unit. They had worked together as a unit, no matter that she was an elf, a Dalish one at that. No matter that they were _shemlen_.

She turned her hand over, thinning her lips as she studied the ethereal green glow centred in her palm. It didn’t hurt. It twinged, somewhat. She was always quite aware that it was there, and that was enough to unsettle her. As she studied it, she remembered something else – that bald hermit of an elf she had met prior to the Conclave. He had been with her as well. Perfectly in place, as though he had waited for the events to unfold all along.

_ It will not be so quiet for long._

He had showed her how to close the rifts. His fingers circling around her wrist, like fire compared to the snow that caked her skin. She touched her own fingers to her wrist now, feeling the heartbeat thrumming beneath the translucent blue veins. In truth, she should be seeking him out, not the _shemlen_. He knew more than he implied, and that irritated her. Unsettled her.

The fennec fur tickled her cheek as she stepped out into the sunlight. It burned her eyes all the way to their backs, and she lifted her hand to block the passage between gaze and daylight. As her vision focused again, she noted that the path was lined with _shemlen_. No – not just the quicklings, but other elves too. Not Dalish, but the lack of _vallaslin_ did not prevent her heart from settling some. Once she had processed all of that, of course, she had to wonder why they were all looking at her in that way. Like she was something _reverent_.

In answer, someone cried out, “It’s the Herald of Andraste!” That was all the spark the crowd needed. Their murmurs ascended, and a chorus of greeting, of prayer-like bliss, reached her ears. Niamh froze on the spot. They must be referring to someone else. The commander, surely. Maybe even one of the soldiers. The _shem_ with the goatee, for all she knew.

It took paralysing heartbeats for her to realise that _she_ was the centre of their admiration. Her, of clan Lavellan.

A Dalish elf.


	4. IV.

“_Thedas must be cleansed with fire and reborn as a paradise. This they solemnly promised; they devoted themselves utterly to seeing this come about. Whether they ever drew closer to their goal is unknown._”

\- Brother Genitivi, from _In Pursuit of Knowledge: The Travels of a Chantry Scholar_

_ _

She was ashamed of herself for standing open-mouthed, swallowed whole by the magnitude of the realisation that had dawned upon her. It was the commander of the Inquisition soldiers who saved her, lightly taking her elbow in one hand and guiding her through the lines of what could only be described as worshippers. Solace came in the form of spotting those few faces who were not so fervent in their appreciation for her as others. Surely _they_ saw how deluded it was to call a Dalish elf anything remotely close to a herald of Andraste. Niamh had been a spy, in the wrong place at the wrong time. The more she remembered, the more it would no doubt come to light that it was all a great misunderstanding.

The _shem_ commander led her up the winding hill, but it was far too long of an ascent for her liking. The more she advanced, the more Niamh felt again that she was a prize piece put on show for the humans to marvel over. At one point, she jerked her arm away from the man, confident in standing upon her own two feet. As she moved to stare strictly forward, she caught a familiar face blending into the gathered crowd. The hermit elf, leaning on his staff, wore a thoughtful visage as he regarded the procession. When their eyes met again, he did not smile.

“There,” the commander made conversation. “That is the Chantry, and inside – ”

“The woman,” Niamh interrupted. “The short-haired one who interrogated me. Is she inside?”

The cogs visibly turned in the tired commander’s head. She had no memory of him prior to this very day – as far as she was aware, he had not been present during the interrogation, and she could not remember coming across him during whatever conflict had followed. _Yet._ No doubt her memories were primed to surprise her.

“Lady Pentaghast?” he ventured. “Yes, she will be inside. It – will be easier to see than to explain.”

She cast a curious look over him, though she could not quench the temptation to look over her shoulder back toward the crowd, where Solas – that was his name – had stood only moments before. He was vanished. Somehow, that didn’t surprise her.

“Why are they treating me like this?” she asked second. He might be a _shem_, and she might not trust him, but she preferred his stilted mannerisms over the open-mouthed awe of the masses. When she posed this question to him, however, he gave a pained smile, mulling over his answer for several long moments. By the time he found it, they had reached the Chantry’s double doors. She paused instinctively before them. She’d never been inside one before, and she was wondering if she wanted to start now.

“They think – that you are their saviour. That Andraste herself sent you forth from the Fade to deliver them from this … catastrophe.”

Another set of images came to her, recalled from the depths of her bruised mind. A vision of her hands grabbing against a smooth rock face, racing against time to reach the rift back to the world that she knew. Divine Justinia turned to her, cried for her to go, leave – and the _shem_ had sacrificed herself, Niamh thought. There had been no Andraste. Just a human woman, a mortal one, who had given her life for Niamh’s.

“Please,” the commander said, noting her pause. “It’s best that we get inside. Lady Pentaghast asked to be notified immediately upon your awakening.”

Her head jerked up as his soldiers moved forward, opening the doors for the both of them. “Will she interrogate me again?” The commander saw the fight or flight instinct in her eyes and his own visage grew resolute.

“I think the time for interrogation is … well. It would suit us better to speak plainly and with understanding.”

The doors opened into a dimly lit hall, deep amber shadows encroaching upon guttering candles, stripes of crimson carpet embracing the cool stone floor. When the Chantry had sealed itself again behind them, Niamh heard the murmurs of the crowd lengthen through them. Now that she had come and gone, it seemed the hour for ripe gossip had begun. The commander was all too eager to walk the length of the hall before her, so she reluctantly followed.

They pushed through another set of doors at the far end of the hall, finding themselves enclosed in a smaller, more manageable chamber. The soldiers ducked away to either side, leaving the commander – whose name, she realised, she hadn’t yet learned – and Niamh to step in alone. Three figures crowded around a table, pinned to its surface a map. At the slightest of sounds, all three raised their heads. The elf recognised two of them – Lady Pentaghast, and the red-haired woman with her cold, calculating gaze. Between them, a woman with warm brown skin and immaculately braided dark hair struggled to straighten with a candle and a sheaf of parchment draped over one arm.

“_Ah!_ Commander Cullen – ” Her dark eyes swept past the commander, landing on Niamh. Her cheery expression faltered into what could only be described as nervousness. Before she could finish her thought, the red-haired woman cut in.

“And the Herald. Good. She is awake.”

Her voice lilted and curled in ways Niamh had not heard regularly. On occasion, outsiders would attempt to breach the Dalish encampments, searching for hospitality where there was none. The Orlesians were particularly brash and entitled, but this woman was far more soft-spoken than her ilk. Her garb cascaded into a sea of intricate chain links that ran down her abdomen, and Niamh did not miss the daggers sheathed at her sides. In turn, the woman was not blind to the elf’s study. The corner of her mouth slanted upward in an almost impish smile.

Promptly, the sight of her was blocked out by the Lady Pentaghast. Seeing her in person, Niamh was surprised at how easily she’d forgotten her. By all accounts, this was a woman that stood out significantly, from the way that she carried herself to the way that she wore her hair. A tight braid roped around her skull where, initially, one might believe she had shaved her tresses short. Scars snipped across her sharp cheeks, and dark kohl accentuated the intensity of her gaze. Her hand perpetually on the hilt of her sword, Niamh briefly thought that the woman would cut her down where she stood. She, however, did not.

“It appears I have misjudged you.” The way that she gave voice to the phrase seemed to insinuate that she was not wholly sincere. Her demeanour still hinted at suspicion, great amounts of it. It was only then, amidst her feverish thoughts, that Niamh realised she was lacking her staff. Things fell rather logically into place.

“Did you judge me for being an elf, or for being a mage?” The frank question set the tone. The red-haired woman cocked her head to one side, and the other, who bore no weapons and was dressed not in armour but a gown the colour of sunshine, began to chew anxiously into her lip. The commander of the Inquisition forces swiftly stepped forward.

“I think we’ve fought enough. I’m the first to be wary of trusting a mage – ”

Further debris rattled into their sockets. Niamh turned her sharp gaze to the commander. “_You_,” she snarled. “You’re a templar.”

The dream-like quality of her procession to the Chantry was sliced gracelessly in half. At least three voices had begun to rise by the time the red-haired woman stepped between them. She was absolutely weightless, ethereal in her steps, that she seemed of a wholly separate reality. Then her words cut them like a splash of iced water, silencing the room.

“_Enough_. This is neither the time _nor_ the place. We are in agreement, are we not? We need her, and as far as I am concerned, _you_ need us.”

The last was directed to Niamh. The boldness of the _shem_, the almost smug quality of her declaration, raised her ire. Then, she realised that was purposeful. The woman was well aware of the elf’s weak spots, and she was using them to exploit Niamh’s irrationality. Swiftly, Niamh threw her guard up. Her lips sealed shut, and she offered only a cold glare in response.

“That’s a start,” the woman spoke with some humour. “Now, if we are all ready to listen?”

Lady Pentaghast glowered, and the commander had grown several shades pinker. The woman in the yellow gown shifted her arm so that her quill and her parchment were fully in front of her, as though she was set to scribe the meeting. When she caught Niamh’s eye, she offered a sympathetic smile.

“You helped us,” the red-haired woman continued. It unsettled Niamh that she could switch so easily from being cold and calculated to warm and encouraging. “No – not only us. The entire _world_. That’s not to say the Breach is fully contained. I’m sure you’ve seen it in the sky, lingering like a bad omen. But we can help one another. Put aside our differences, as Justinia would have wanted.”

She glanced at Lady Pentaghast, and this seemed to chastise the woman. Her head bowed, and Niamh observed the passage of grief over her visage.

“So,” the Orlesian concluded, “we will do as she would have willed us to. Cassandra?”

Lady Pentaghast glanced upward, then fully straightened her spine. There was a renewed energy to her when she looked into Niamh’s face. As swiftly as her passions had overwhelmed her, she held them in check. “We are reinstating the Inquisition. And we want _you_ to be a part of it.”

Niamh found her own hostility tempered by the maelstrom of confusion that cottoned her brain. The more anyone in the chamber spoke, the more her memories returned to her. The Breach – she knew that to be the tear in the sky that she had sealed only temporarily. Justinia, by the way that they spoke and from what little she remembered, was dead. She could vaguely recall running beneath the shadow of the temple – turning a corner and seeing the woman suspended in the air like … like nothing she had ever seen before. Instinctively, she looked down into her hand; the gentle green glow that spilled out between her knuckles.

“Reinstating,” she repeated. “Haven’t you already done so? Isn’t _this_ the Inquisition?”

She swept her arm over the room. Gestured to the outside and beyond. The four _shem_ exchanged glances.

“_This_,” Cassandra enunciated. “This was a precaution. Now, with Justinia’s death, our worst fears have been made into reality. We must act, and swiftly.”

“The Chantry will not recognise us immediately,” the red-haired woman added. “They may even deny us.”

“But it is the power of _belief_ that will unite the people.” This time, the woman in the yellow gown spoke. She pointed her quill at Niamh, a delicate punctuation to her words. “Belief in _you_, the Herald of Andraste.”

The title in its full length filled the small chamber with rippling unease. Whatever battles they had fought together, Niamh could not allow them to think that she represented their Andraste in any manner. “I am not the herald.” Her voice was not as soft and coercive as the red woman’s. It was not as commanding as the Lady Pentaghast’s. It was raw, hoarse, confused, and she could not be bothered to disguise it. “Not of Andraste, not of anything.”

“Should your belief colour theirs?” the red-haired woman prompted. “Maybe faith is what they need.”

“_Misguided_ faith.”

“Regardless, _you_ were saved. That means something.”

Niamh felt cornered. Not only was she surrounded by strangers, they looked to her now as though she was some semblance of saviour. On a mundane day, she had no doubt they would have referred to her as _knife-ear_ and summarily sent her on her way. That stung her more than anything else, the hypocrisy of it. Then, it dawned on her, looking upon their faces, that they _all_ believed in some manner. She did not know the extent of what she had told them during the interrogation. She could not remember that. But where she imagined Justinia had been the one to save her, everyone else appeared convinced, truly, that Andraste had been her guiding hand.

Suddenly, doubt filled the flat of her belly. She found that she could not distinguish her memories from one another. Had Justinia been by her side as she closed the Breach? Had Justinia called for her to run before or after she had somehow slipped into the Fade? And there had been another – something inhuman, something more gruesome than she had seen even in the most predatory corners of the wilderness. Something that had held the Divine up as though she was a toy, paralysed within the air.

If that was possible, could it be that Andraste, or something like her, had been involved as well?

“Are you alright?” The question caught her off-guard. The scribe had lowered her quill, a concerned frown settling into place along her delicate, rounded features. Niamh was surprised to see the concern mirrored on all the _shem_’s faces – even the templar’s. She stumbled back until she felt the door at her heel, some reassurance that there was an exit, that there would always _be_ an exit.

Time. She needed time to figure out the lay of the land, what had truly happened, and who the minds behind the Inquisition were. She needed to find a way to reach out to Deshanna. She needed to know how Solas was involved in this. _You hunger for things that no-one can give you._ Niamh shut her eyes against the echo of her mentor’s words. _They can give me this_, she thought. _I am owed this._

Keeping her eyes closed, her body loose, she allowed herself to fall gracelessly to the floor.


	5. V.

“_Be calm, be methodical, and wait for your opponent to yield to the fear of your blade and shield. When he does, he will convince himself that he can attack you directly, that his blades are fast enough to slip past your shield. Then he will move, and then you may kill him._”

\- Swordmaster Massache de Jean-mien, from _A Meditation upon the Use of Blades_

_ _

“It was a clever trick,” a familiar voice chided her, “but far from convincing.”

Niamh carefully peeled open one eye. She was returned once more to that small hut of her sick bed, though none had dared to remove the armour from her body this time around. In truth, she had been exhausted enough that she had somewhat lost consciousness between the Chantry and the hut. She told herself it was the _shem_’s fault for thrusting such dire topics upon her when she was barely broken free of her fever.

Solas watched her from the adjacent wall. She could imagine that he had wandered in and positioned himself there to pontificate aloud. His fingers clasped the point of his chin, one tip lightly tapping upon his lip. Neither of them moved, aside from that.

“Good,” Niamh declared flatly. “We can talk.”

She thought she saw the flicker of a begrudging smile at her call-back. He pushed off the wall, striding effortlessly to reach the bed. There was something unsettling about seeing him, not so tall as he was, looking down upon her, so she sat up. She wasn’t surprised that her head started to drum and ache, and that fresh bruises had bloomed along her body. Hitting the floor like that wasn’t exactly leaping into a pile of leaves.

“You were reckless,” he noted, “but you wanted time. You have it.”

“How do you know I wanted time?”

“Leliana sees more than you give her credit for. She suggested that I be here when you miraculously woke up. That you might trust an _elf_ better than another of her kind.”

The way he said the word ‘elf’ slid a thin knife of confusion beneath her skin. He said it condescendingly, almost insultingly. Yet, for all that she could see, he _was_ an elf. Without _vallaslin_, and with far too much insight, but an elf all the same. Niamh swung her feet to the floorboards to stand, but with one swift touch of his hand to her shoulder, he stopped her. Again, that strange flush of heat where their skin connected. His hand retracted, as though he had felt the same.

No. She was imagining it.

“You should not stand.” He was back to chiding her, though his expression was unreadable.

“You said it yourself. It was a clever trick. I can stand well enough.”

“Who do you believe nursed you back to some semblance of good health? I know what you are capable of. Please.”

She looked up at him in surprise. She had assumed one of the _shemlen_ had watched over her recovery. For one, Niamh had not considered Solas to be any sort of healer. The thought that it was him who must have removed her armour beforehand flushed the tips of her ears, but she called no attention to that. Instead, she asked him, “Why?” The question appeared to take him by surprise. There was something comforting about defying the expectations of a man who was convinced he knew everything.

“Why not?” he countered. “You are the _herald_ of Andraste. You’ve stabilised the Breach, however temporary, and retain the mark upon your hand. Your life is of great value. Why would I not do my utmost to see you recovered?”

“My life is of great value to _them_. Why should that influence your decision?”

His lips twisted. Was that disappointment? Jaded mirth? “If you believe that, your perspective is narrow. Elf, human, dwarf. All are affected, and all have you to thank for the victory of the day. Do you truly underestimate the power that resides in the palm of your hand?”

Again, those shreds of memory. She was beginning to tire of how they would ricochet off her skull, plunging deep with detail where she was too weary to think. Of course, she could close the rifts because of the mark – not because of some innate power. And the mark … no. She couldn’t remember how the mark had come to her. Perhaps blessed Andraste had gifted it to her as a final kiss of suffering. As she looked down to it, he tilted her chin up with his fingers. His eyes searched hers, no matter how she glared resentfully for it.

“You do not remember.” It was a statement, not a question. “Little wonder you fled from the Chantry as you did.”

“I did not _flee_.” The answer was once again raw; guttural. Each held the gaze of the other like so. His features softened.

“May I help? A simple conversation may inspire memory where there is none.”

“I seem to have become your favoured conversationalist.”

“You pique my interest. Many others’ as well, clearly.”

“Yet you do not believe I am the _Herald of Andraste_. Do you?”

He did not answer, choosing instead to indulge in an irritating half-smile. He sat at the foot of the bed, polite enough not to encroach too much on her space. She pulled her knees to her chin anyway.

“What is the last thing that you recall?” He used a business-like tone, and it reminded her of Deshanna’s lessons. When she changed from Keeper to teacher, so did the personality she put on display. A warm and encouraging mentor could transition effortlessly into a stoic, unaffected stone face, flicking back all of Niamh’s mistakes like sand into her eyes.

“Before the explosion.” She had not even recalled there was an explosion until she put name to it. Frustrated, she closed her eyes. “I had run into the temple. I found the Divine.” She paused. Had she, or had she dreamt it all? What was true and what was imagined? Solas appeared to sense her struggle. He reached out, laying a slender hand upon the ragged material of the blanket by her foot. There was something about the personality which could be deciphered from the maintenance of one’s fingers, Niamh found. His was slender and clean, like thin lines of poetry.

“The explosion was the cause of the tear in the Veil,” he told her. “You were considered the main culprit – your proximity to the temple at the time, perhaps. The mark on your hand.”

“How did it get there? The mark?”

“Likely you were too close to the site of the explosion. When the Breach was created, so too the mark. Only a theory, of course.”

She opened her eyes into slivers, watching him through her lashes. He, in turn, studied her intently. A scholar, and she the tome. She shifted her weight on the threadbare mattress.

“I remember being interrogated. Likewise, I remember fighting alongside the _shemlen_. I closed the rift with them.”

“Yes. I watched it happen. The birth of a hero.”

“I am not a hero.”

The corner of his mouth curled up, patronising. “To your eyes, no. What your eyes may see, others will not.”

“You aren’t so deluded. You know what I was – a spy for the Dalish. If they thought for long enough, they’d realise that themselves.”

“If they truly believe you to be Andraste’s herald, would that matter?”

“The _shem_ would have spit at me on sight before all of this. Now you think they honour me with their pretty Andraste? No. They’re fools. Blinded, all of them.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps they have lost their families, their friends, and cling to the only shred of hope left to them, no matter how illogical.”

That, at least, seemed to paint his beliefs in a visible light. It did not surprise her that he would recognise the ludicrous nature of her being the Herald of Andraste. Relief touched her anyway, enough to straighten a little more and be receptive to his conversation. Adjacent to him, at least, she was still Niamh of clan Lavellan. Not some distorted hero, some saviour for the doomed and bereaved.

“The Breach,” she said at length. “You said I stabilised it, but I haven’t … _sealed_ it.”

“No. The rift you contended with was in connection with the Breach. You have prevented its growth, but not its danger.” Solas paused. “What little do you remember of that?”

“Practically nothing.”

The elf inclined his head. “The veil between us and the Fade was extraordinarily thin. Time and reality itself was distorted. Our friends bore witness to your last conversation with the Divine.”

Justinia was suspended beneath her eyelids, splayed for death as the monstrous being before her curled his fingers into a fist. Niamh shook her head instinctively, as though that gesture would be enough to shake the images free and away. “I wasn’t alone with her,” she murmured. “There was another – _others_ – ”

“Varric has some theories. The presence of red lyrium there was familiar to him.”

_Varric_. His broad, amicable face surfaced within her myriad thoughts. A heavyset dwarf with a crossbow, easy-going by nature, clashing with the ire of Lady Pentaghast. The red lyrium too stung like rubies against her mind’s periphery. It made her think of a half-dozen crimson eyes watching her from upon the crest of the next hill. Once again, Niamh squeezed shut her own gaze.

“And then?” she prompted.

“Why, you sealed the rift. The effort of it had exerted you fully, and you awoke here.”

“And you looked after me. My health.”

Though she could not see him, she tried to picture how his expression might shift when he was not being watched. He did not seem to be particularly devious with his motives, even if he had not revealed a single one of them during the course of this conversation. That made him all the more clever, she thought. He had situated the conversation so that the questions she asked were as far away from him as possible, centred around her own significance.

“It was the least that I could do,” he said at length. His hand retreated from the blanket.

“You knew that something was amiss. You warned me beforehand. Do you remember?”

“Yes. I find it hard to forget.”

She could not swallow the urge to look at him. As ever, he radiated calm and serenity, unfazed by her attempt to shift the tables, her curiosity, his way. She kept her voice low and, she hoped, as tranquil as he himself appeared.

“Were you involved, Solas?”

He measured her. The faint trace of a smile evened out to neutrality, and she wondered if his patronising demeanour had melted into a more cordial respect at her boldness in asking. Then, he leaned forward and swept up onto his feet. Before she could think, his open palm was offered to her.

“Will you walk with me?” he asked. Though the question was posed with restraint, there was a sudden colourful intensity to his gaze. She hadn’t quite noticed yet the hue of his eyes, like an almost pearlescent variety of moss green. Perhaps that was too elaborate a thought. She certainly hadn’t imagined herself capable of such poetic comparison, and she felt the freckled skin of her cheeks flush with heat.

“Is that wise?” She eyed his hand, and then his face, no doubt with all the mistrust of an animal preyed upon once too often.

“Do you consider me unwise?” It was his own dry taste of humour, and he smiled for himself as much as he did to reassure her.

“You haven’t answered me.”

“Please. If you are worried for your sense of balance, you may lean on me as you wish.” He demonstrated the sincerity of the gesture by changing the open palm to a brandished arm. Beneath the fall of his sleeve, it seemed remarkably thin. He did not hunt enough to put meat upon his bones, she thought. Or perhaps he had grown so much alone, he had grown starved in the process. _A wolf survives with his pack._ The thought was fleeting, and as piercing when applied to herself. She was alone, after all, amidst the _shemlen_. Or … not so alone.

He was there, after all.

Her own thin hand, white skin drawn tight over discoloured knuckles, settled on his forearm. Then she lifted herself. Where she expected her head to spin, her exertion to make its mark upon her physically as she had felt only earlier, she instead found herself curiously light upon her feet. She blinked down at his arm, confused at this subversion. Watching her intently as ever, the elf named Solas allowed himself a wider smile.

“Shall we?” When his confidence flared, so too did his cadence grow more commanding. If she had second thoughts, they were swept away in the shadow of his chin tilted up; his moss-green eyes already seeking their next destination. She kept step with him, lifting another hand to brace herself for the pain of the daylight. Once more subverted in her expectations, they stepped out beneath a canopy of stars. The village was silent all around them, though she could make out the steadfast glow of torches and campfires. The passage of hours must have been greater than she’d imagined.

Then, instinctively, she turned to gaze over the snowy mountains. The Breach remained also watchful in the sky, a shimmering, pulsating scar that obscured the heavens.

“It is beautiful,” Solas reflected, “in its own way.” When she twisted her head back, she found that the tear in the Veil was reflected in his eyes, like will-‘o’-wisps, the tendrils of departed souls.

“It has claimed many lives. Lives that have fallen beyond it.” Niamh hesitated. “Do you think they see us? From the Fade?”

His eyebrows rose, though not enough to suggest derision. “Not in the way that you might imagine. You will find memories there – stories hidden where even your wisest elders have long forgotten their origins. The marks of ancient battlefields, of vast and unspoken discoveries. As for the dead – ”

“ – they are not truly the dead,” Niamh finished, in recital. “Those that come back to us are demons. Abominations.”

His brows dropped sharply downwards. “I would not say such so definitively. They are spirits, yes, drawn to fulfil the purpose which they consider their own. Only so misguided as we ourselves are so capable of being.” Solas tilted his head. “But those words are not your true thoughts on the matter.”

“They are what I was taught. What is true.” She focused her own furrowed, quizzical stare onto him. “You sympathise with demons?”

“Once again, your perspective is narrow. Your ire is risen at the thought of being categorised as _knife-ear_, here amongst those who are not of your kind. Would you not think the same would apply to those spirits you indiscriminately mislabel?”

“I didn’t realise you were so passionate.”

“If I cannot be passionate about such distortions of truth, I wonder at my ability to be passionate at all.”

Niamh turned her face away. The village was remarkably still, even despite the scattered lights. Eerily so. It was as though they were the only two there – as though the Inquisition had silently packed up and left, moving onto kinder and greener ground. “You know much,” she murmured at length. “You’ve studied the Fade in some manner?”

“For as long as I have lived.”

She couldn’t resist a tired, scattered laugh. “A grand and sweeping statement.”

“Perhaps. But I have always held an interest in it in some form.”

“You are a mage, like me. We’re taught to be aware of it. To be aware of how it influences us.”

“You are,” Solas corrected. “Your magic – it is remarkably unique, for where you have come from. It brings to mind the arts of the Nevarran death mages, if such dabblings can be referred to as _art_.”

“Death mages?”

“Yes. The Mortalitasi. They draw wisps from across the Veil to act on their behalf. To the eyes of others, they are like ghosts. Twisted faces of the ones that they have loved, often mummified at the hands of those very same mages. They too believe in the souls of their loved ones being trapped in the Fade. Perhaps that lends credence to their belief that they are haunted by such magics.”

Against conscious thought, Niamh’s shoulders had stiffened. The memory of her clan’s bonfire erupting into a twisted maelstrom of haunted, agonised faces pierced through her mind. “I haven’t studied in the ways of the Mortalitasi. My powers came to me as they are.”

“I see. I apologise if this is a tender subject for you. It is not why I brought you here.”

“Then why? What is the charade?”

He twisted his body to face her, his arm moving in toward his body and, in tandem, pulling her to him. Once again, she was paralysed by the intensity of his gaze. “_Not_ a charade,” he declared firmly. “You asked whether I was involved in the events that transpired at the Conclave.” Niamh remained firmly aware of their closeness, both because it was hard to ignore, and because she was naturally wary of her own boundaries. Still, she remained as she was.

“A question you avoided answering. Were you?”

There was a flicker in his eyes – something like doubt, or hesitation. Then, as though he were disappointed by his own answer, he said, “No. I merely prophesied the route which the Conclave would take – various disagreements, overlong debates. Had I imagined it would end in such dire circumstances, I would have done much more, and much sooner.”

Her initial suspicion faltered into confusion. “What could you have done? The _shem_ will never change. It is their way to revel in conflict. To look down upon others and deem themselves greater. They will do the same to you, no matter your noble inclinations.” As she spoke, his doubt likewise moved into sadness, contrasting starkly with the curve of his lips.

“Interesting, coming from one who would call me thin of blood.”

The sure-fire urge to retort came to her, but Niamh found that there were no words to accompany it. In the space of her silence, Solas inclined his head.

“You need only look to yourself to answer the question of what I could do. I could help. _You_ – you will do more than help. The mark on your hand has singled you out, perhaps unfairly. I imagine you had hoped to flee under cover of night; report back to your Keeper. I think such an instinct comes from duty, rather than your true inclination.”

“You already consider yourself a master on the topic of my inclination?”

Another infuriatingly cryptic half-smile graced his lips. “I have my thoughts on it.”

Increasingly, Niamh was growing aware of the lack of sound which surrounded them. Having been trained to be aware of the creaks and groans of the wilderness, the absence of such was progressively putting her on alert. Sensing her restlessness, Solas effortlessly glided through a change of subject. “You are wondering where they are,” he noted. “More useful would be to wonder where _we_ are.”

“And what does _that_ mean, exactly?”

The half-smile deepened. “That you have not strayed so far as you think. In fact, you have not woken at all. Certainly not in time to meet discreetly with the keeper of your clan. Understandable, given the amount of yourself you have given to the Inquisition’s cause.” He lifted a hand and, without pre-empt, snapped his fingers before her eyes.

Niamh rocketed up in her bed, her back aching from its constant press against the unyielding mattress. The unmistakeable tendrils of daylight had snaked through the cracks in the hut’s door, as well as its shuttered windows. Sitting near her upon a threadbare chair, a mug of steaming soup in his hands, Solas retained his enigmatic smile. She could not say how he had managed it, how it was possible that he had infiltrated her dreams, but she knew precisely _why_ he had done it.

“You’ve foiled me,” she accused. “All this time, you’ve been stalling for morning!” His laugh silvered the air between them, soothing the hairs on the back of her neck no matter how much she willed them to bristle.

“As I said, it was a clever trick. Mine – a little cleverer.”


	6. VI.

“_Known lore tells us that small rifts can be sealed … but what about a large one? What if some catastrophic magical event created a rift so large and horrific, it weakened the integrity of the Veil as a whole? Such a ‘breach’ would threaten our entire world, turning concerns about occasional demonic intrusion into a charming anecdote compared to the monsters we would then face._

_If there is anything to be done, any reason we should look at magic with fear, it is for that possibility more than any other._”

\- Lady Seeker Alandra Vael, from _The True Threat of Magic_

_ _

“You’ve worked your charms on her, alright.”

Varric Tethras was a stout, ginger-haired dwarf, sporting the sort of nose that had been on the wrong end of a fist too many times in his life, sealed with the crack of a scar across the flattened bridge. When he wasn’t speaking, he stuck the feathery end of a quill against his lips, not quit setting his teeth on the little spines. The majority of his attention was on the sheaf of parchment in his lap, but Solas had long since learned he was quite talented at multitasking. He felt his brow tinge upward, a little too enthusiastic in wanting to brush off the thought.

“Hardly. Her decisions are her own.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Chuckles. She’d’ve sooner run back to her clan if you hadn’t saved the day with your sweet talking.” The dwarf’s brown eyes narrowed, then the quill set back to scribbling on the parchment with renewed inspiration. Not for the first time, Solas was left wondering where Varric’s nickname for him had originated. There was a distinct lack of chuckling.

The day was mild, as far as the cold was concerned. Though the breeze was still biting in parts, the constant upkeep of the campfires between buildings and tents kept a form of sunshine close to them. In tandem, both elf and dwarf glanced up to see the so-called herald haggle with the merchant Seggrit, her freckled brow constantly furrowed as she poked finger through what bare supplies the Inquisition had gathered. She had cleaned up well, her braid immaculate over one shoulder, and a new green scarf of fluttering silk cast about her throat. Whether she was aware of it or not, it marked her as part of the company. The rift between herself and the _shemlen_ had grown a little smaller; the lines a little more indistinct.

“Fangs seems a little nicer,” Varric commented. “Friendlier.”

“_Fangs?_” If Chuckles had seemed arbitrary to Solas, Fangs was even more so. The dwarf cocked a twinkling eye to him, the hint of a grin tugging at his stubbled mouth.

“All bite, no bark. At least, she _used_ to be. Like I said – you worked your charms.”

“The notion seems a disservice to her. She is not so hostile as you think.”

“I’ll take your word for it. She still looks at me like I’m about to sprout three more heads. Guess she never got too many dwarves round the Dalish camps. _Probably_ for good reason.”

Niamh limply held up a cowl from Seggrit’s wares. Even though Solas could not hear her, he could imagine her critique of its make playing out over the wintry air. By the way the merchant cringed after every syllable, he considered his whimsical guess confirmed. “She is an outsider,” he observed lightly. “Nervous, yes. Careful, most certainly. But she is intelligent. Capable of surmising the worth of an alliance; even friendship.”

“You’re starting to sound smitten with her, Chuckles. Come to think, that’d explain a lot.”

A flush of irritation rippled through him. The intensity of it was surprising. “I am told you’ve written many a romance. A scribe is often in danger of falling too deeply into his own thoughts. Seeing the world through one lens and one lens alone.”

“_Ouch_. That’s the most scathing review I’ve gotten from someone who _hasn’t_ read my work.” Varric looked up again from his letter and, for the moment, set it aside. “And I didn’t mean it as an insult. You’re young, she’s young. You’ve been travelling alone for quite some time … ”

Solas attempted to relax the gritting of his teeth. “_Young?_”

“_Ahhh_, it’s hard to tell with you elf-y folks. Don’t tell me you’re going on a century.”

“That, my friend, is for you to approximate.”

Varric’s bushy brows rode up. “I’ve caught her stealing glances. And I’m _thinking_ decrepit old men aren’t her type.”

Solas sighed. “The conversation is growing vulgar.”

“You’re _blushing_.”

“I am most certainly not.”

“You are!” Varric leaned forward over the log he was perched upon, the open front of his shirt doing little to obscure the broad chest beneath, as well as its fine fuzz of hair. His wide grin was enough to prompt Solas to look away irritably. _Toward_ the herald, no less. “You know what, Chuckles, I take it back. _She_ worked her charm on _you_.”

Niamh lifted her head from Seggrit’s wares to return his glance, and for a moment, merchant and dwarf seemed to dwindle away. She did not smile, not with her mouth, but the spark in her pale eyes lit an uncomfortable heat in him that mortified as well as scintillated.

Varric was right, Solas realised.

That was a problem.


	7. VII.

“_Say that it is true, that the Maker made us. What if He made us for food? What if the grand purpose of our searching existence is to stretch the belly of a beast that slinks through the tall grass? What if there is a single unbending purpose and, in it, we are cattle to feed the witless leviathans that slumber unseen beneath us?_”

\- Baron Havard-Pierre d’Amortisan, from _An Anatomie of Various Terrible Beasts_

_ _

Beneath the periwinkle sky which overlooked Val Royeaux, a girl was poised with red-fletched arrows, searching for her mark and time. It was cool, sunny – an unbothered day for her unbothered disposition. Her yellow hair was jagged and self-cut. Her face was scrubbed clean, bare, slightly pink from the force that had been put behind coming face to face with the _Herald of Andraste’s Tits_, or whatever they were calling her. Evidently she was pointy too, like Sera was. In the ears, you know.

That interested her, but only a little.

The _real_ interest was in the who-knows-whatsit that was happening in the sky or wherever. Beasties crawling through tears that shouldn’t be there. Mages and templars arguing, but what for? The Divine was _dead_. And now, in the centre of Val Royeaux, they were arguing even _more_ – but this time, the Chantry was involved. The Inquisition too.

And there she was. That was the Herald, wasn’t it? Sera knelt in the shadow of a pale-stoned tower, furrowing her brow when she realised that she wasn’t very remarkable at all. Dalish, by all that scribbling on her face. Kind of plain, but her _eyes_ were what stuck out. Looked like she was set out to freezing anyone who stood in her way, and maybe she was succeeding. Maybe people just didn’t like the thought of an _elf_ being the herald of Andraste’s bum.

Taking a long, slow inhale, Sera aimed. Then, she loosed one of the red-fletched arrows.

It struck the stone near the Central Rotunda, drawing short the Herald’s party. The warrior woman, all dark hair and chiselled cheekbones, was the first to step forward, kneel, and read the message attached. Sera retreated into the shadow, but she kept a close eye all the same. There were other Jennies about, but she trusted her eyes more than anyone else’s. You had to, in this day and age. The message was relayed to the Herald, but her head was already up, scouting the roofs for the shooter.

_Smart_, Sera thought. At least the saviour of the world was quick on her feet.

She was playing a game, but not a game. Three little red handkerchiefs across the pretty breadth of Val Royeaux. If the Herald _really_ cared what mattered, she’d play. And if she played, Sera reckoned she’d have a good assessment of the Herald’s character. Maybe it was silly of her, but she wanted to _know_ what this big old hero was like. If she was uppity like all the rest, then sod her, and sod the fate of the world too, Inquisition and all. If she cared for the little people? Then maybe there was hope for Thedas.

The Herald played. The docks, the Orlesian café, the upper market. Her quiet feet traipsed across the pavement, her head held high even as the uppities stared her down. Probably called her names behind her back. Sera teetered along roofs and turrets, her arms stretched out at her sides. The more elfy down below played, the more elfy up above was having fun. It was always fun, right, when things worked out _just_ how you planned it? When she read the final clue, Sera was satisfied to see that she didn’t abruptly leave Val Royeaux.

Good. She was sticking around.

That was a little bit of hope in the score margin.

What followed when Niamh followed Red Jenny’s trail was an ambush. Her cheeks were still burning from the proximity from a thrown fireball, the moon a cold glittering disc overhead, when Sera the archer showed herself.

She was young. That struck Niamh first about her. Slower to follow was the recognition, again, that she was a city elf. Fresh-faced, her mannerisms less the trained hunter and more the brazen swagger of a _shem_. But she was not a _shem_. They eyed each other up from tiles away, both their shoulders heaving with the exertion of the scuffle that had wound to an end only moments prior. Noticing the newcomer, the Lady Cassandra Pentaghast hefted up her sword and sliced her shadow in between the Herald’s and the Red Jenny. Sera noticed that. Her green eyes narrowed, the bags beneath them cutting the finest of lines into her cream-coloured skin.

“Oh, _ew_. You’re not one of those – _die for her, never question her_ types, are you?”

What a way to set first impressions. There was a long, dicey silence before another voice in the back cleared his throat. Varric, his crossbow still cocked at the ready over one arm, watched the scene unfold with some measure of amusement and an equal amount of trepidation. “Maybe we, _ah_ – need some answers. Right, Fangs?”

_Fangs_, Sera noted, but she was disappointed that the Herald didn’t have any fangs to speak of. She had a staff, and she had her magic-y bits. That must be stirring the Chantry up into a right fit, all that magic and elf-iness in one go. There was another elf, hairless like a babe, who was _also_ all magic-y – but he was more watching than talking, and Sera found that annoying rather than smart. “Yeah, right, well,” she started, “we’re the Friends of Red Jenny, yeah? And we’ve been watching you. And _he_ was up to no good.”

She pointed at the dead noble with punctuation; watched as the so-called Herald flitted her own gaze there and back. She had really intense eyes, this one. Most probably couldn’t even look in her face, but they didn’t bother Sera half so much. Better to have a lot going on in there than nothing at all.

“What did he do?” There was a faint, husky quality to the elf-y Herald’s voice. Made Sera think of naked acorns and crackling leaves and – stuff she didn’t really know all that much about. Wood smoke. Shite like that, weird Dalish things. She shuddered and shrugged off the weight of the words, like they were about to crawl into her lungs and make her cough.

“Doesn’t _matter_ what he did, does it? Just matters that it was _bad stuff_. And you stopped him. That’s good. Means maybe I’m right about you.”

Something like apprehension crept into the Herald’s gaze. She glanced at the warrior woman, who was all too set scowling down at Sera like she’d scuffed up some wrong noble’s shoe. She didn’t like that, so she kept her focus on the Herald.

“It _is_ about you, yeah? They’re not using you for – I dunno. Elf-y points?” Sera paused. “Seems like kind of a shite plan, if they are.”

“Using me for what?”

“We-_e_-ell, you know. You’re the Herald of Andraste, aren’t you?” Another pause. “Wait. Did I get it all wrong? Are you just like, Dalish off the street or something?”

“It’s complicated,” the dwarf rushed in. He had lowered his crossbow by then, putting on his best diplomat’s pose. Sera reckoned he was the only silver tongue they had between the group of them, which was a little sad for the Inquisition. They were going to have to do a lot of convincing, after all. “Ask Fangs, she’ll tell you she isn’t herald of anything, on account of not giving a rat’s ass about Andraste.”

From Niamh’s perspective, she watched the young elf girl’s face light up, then considerably pucker inward in a particularly ominous sounding cackle. Like that, the river of tension that had built between them popped, not audibly, but enough that Cassandra shifted her weight and creaked, and Solas set the end of his staff down lightly upon the pavement.

“Oh, yeah? Oh, I like her already. Bet the rats don’t give their asses about her, either. I mean, sure, she’s good for _some_ things – ”

“_Why_ are we here?” Cassandra asked. She made no particular effort at keeping the impatience from her tone. Sera let loose a long, theatrical exhale.

“Like I said, we’re the Friends of Red Jenny. Got eyes and ears everywhere, especially where it counts. Figure since the world’s gone to shit, we could help, right? Help the world be less shit. Scratch each other’s arses. Shite like that. _So._ Herald-not-a-Herald, I don’t care if you’re holy or not. If you’re kicking the baddies, I want my share. Got the right boots for it and all. What d’you say?”

Sera watched as, like a crack moving through marble, the first hint of a smile tugged at the corner of Niamh Lavellan’s mouth.

“You are quiet.”

Solas inwardly cursed himself for breaking the silence. In truth, he had been cursing himself since he had instigated this midnight _rendezvous_ – an eerily quiet and picturesque slope of hill dotted with wavering crystal grace. She sat to his right, one knee drawn up to her chest, the other thin leg stretched out and hid amidst the tall grass. She raised her head when he spoke, that instinctual jerk up that told him she was ever listening for the approach of a predator. Their eyes met seamlessly.

“I am sorry,” she said suddenly, “for what I called you when we first met.” It took him moments to recall it, and then he softened.

“I took no offence.”

“It doesn’t matter. It was cruel.”

She looked back down at the grass, her freckled brow pinched together. The mark of Andruil was like a faded dark ribbon over her skin. No doubt it had been fresher, crisper, when first she had received it, her naturally pale flesh reddened from irritation. Now she was colourless, save for the brown strands of hair that tickled at her cheeks, her nape. He resisted the urge to reach out to them; twist them round his fingertips.

“The girl from Val Royeaux,” he murmured at length. “She would also fall under the Dalish label of _thin-blood_.”

“She’s young. Too young. And she was alone, no matter what she said.”

“She is capable,” Solas assessed gently. “The last that she would desire is to be coddled. It is admirable for her to offer aid, though her motives remain – unclear.”

A humourless snort left Niamh. “You are like me. Always searching for the hidden agenda.”

“Is that so terrible?”

“It isn’t very comforting.”

He did reach out, in time. When his nails hooked in her hair, he saw the ripple of goosebumps raise her skin. Her eyes moved, slanting, measuring him. Solas settled his palm on her cold neck.

“I am sorry as well. I did not mean to trap you. Give you the illusion of choice while ushering you into filling the so-called Herald’s steps.” He saw her surprise bloom in the centre of her pale irides. Her eyes were remarkably round when up close, the soft dusting of freckles across her pert nose turned particularly stark when the light seemed so translucent through the rest of her. She was pretty in the way a carefully preserved and bleached bone might be pretty. Beautiful in that harsh way snow hugged the Frostback range. And all this observation, all these things that stirred in his chest, were remarkably inappropriate. Not only did it ill fit this strange position she found herself in, it did little to bolster his own aims. Furthermore, Solas thought, it would do everything to ruin him.

Her surprise melted into confusion. Her equally freckled brow furrowed. He wanted to smooth it, and he hated himself for the instinct.

“My clan do not want me back.” The words were a cold, wet slap against his cheek. He had imagined he had figured out the lay of the land so effortlessly, he had failed to consider why she might have swayed so easily into staying. “I am an outcast to them. Cursed. Here, I am needed – even accepted, somehow. You did not trap me. You would not be able to.”

The last was not a jape. There was no trace of a smile. She was solemn, cool, but she was not talking down to him. She was simply being frank. Solas made to pull his hand away, but she reached up and pinched his wrist – held his touch there, and somehow he could not find the will to separate from her fully.

“It does not bother you?” he asked quietly. “That they desire you to be something you believe you are not?”

“They cannot change me,” she answered with the same conviction. Then, she loosed her fingers from his wrist and turned her palm to him. The green gash remained present between the folds of skin, emanating that soft, spellbinding glow he had long associated with the Fade. “I cannot change what has happened to me. I am not a lost pup, Solas. Not anymore. I know who I am, what I am – and I know what I must do.”

He envied her her surety. He could account for all of the same, and yet he had made a grand error. A grand error that had led him to her, this precipice with which he was faced with his own truth.

If he meant to succeed, he could not have her.

But he wanted her.


	8. VIII.

“_The song is soft, but hard to crack. I hear the words. I can even taste them. But I cannot say them._”

\- a blood-spattered page from a journal

She was remarkable from the moment she set foot in Madame de Fer’s hall. She was _scandalous_, Dalish, her history on her cheeks and her brow and her ears and her teeth, all bared and pretty for the partygoers to see. They hadn’t managed to tame her and roll her around in pretty silks. Steam her hair and let the chestnut lustre shine through. He admired her for bucking all of those conventions. He admired her, mostly, for standing her ground.

Marquis Alphonse descended upon her like a vulture searching for the bleached bone. Why he picked her, besides being greedy and poor at insight, the bystander would never fully know. The bystander was aware, however, that Vivienne de Fer watched every occurrence that transpired in Duke Bastien’s estate. She was, no doubt, just as aware of him – aware of him watching, and who he was watching, no matter how well he disguised himself. He had foreseen it, but for now, he was content simply not to be noticed by this so-called Herald of Andraste. Not until the time was right.

Madame de Fer was not so modest. Her hand lightly traipsing the banister of the grand staircase, each step she took measured and elegant, she imposed herself between marquis and guest. The Herald did not look upon her as an ally. Why should she? She was surrounded by her lifelong enemies – excepting the bystander, of course, though he hesitated to think she might consider him an ally. Given his profession and, _eh_ – roots? Doubtful.

Madame de Fer swung her morion hand up. The marquis quaked in his boots. By the time she and the herald had turned away together, he had already crumpled onto the immaculate tiled floor. The bystander glided along the edge of the balcony, trailing them. The crushed velvet of his doublet’s shoulder scraped across the arm of a passing girl. Their eyes met, and he flashed her a disarming smile.

“_Désolé_, my dear.” His cadence swayed a little cocksure into his rusted Orlesian, but afterward, she did not seem so bothered by the disturbance. He had, however, lost sight of both _madame_ and herald in the meantime – before he saw them silhouetted against the tall windows that lined the northern wall. Their heads were turned to one another, but he needed to be closer to read their lips.

“ … there is much I could lend to the Inquisition.” The _madame_’s voice curled over the ambience of the room. She did not care who heard her, and that was bold too. Though none of the guests would speak ill of her to her face, they had already formed their opinions concerning the Inquisition – this Dalish-headed heretical japery. The bystander paused, draping his hands over the curve of the balcony, tucking one foot behind the other. He had long learned that, sometimes, to be unseen, one need only stand in plain sight.

Or, perhaps, he wanted to be seen. By her, specifically. He knew the grain that needed to go into one who would alter the course of history. His own history had been irrevocably changed by someone who was once cast into exile, but now stood high in the hierarchy of royalty. There was something in the air, these days. Something in the air that reminded him of those turbulent times. It both wounded him and excited him. And the herald was no fool – this huntress, this picturesque Dalish girl, would have seen a clumsy wolf shuffling from miles away. Her pale, intent eyes moved over the _madame_’s flared shoulder. There was a twitch to her brow, her nose, as though she had sniffed something brewing on the breeze.

Their eyes met. Duke Bastien’s estate receded into the purple-hued shadows – between the long satin skirts, the delicate gilded trays with their trembling champagne flutes. The daylight beyond the tall windows was a smattering of halo about her figure, stark and thin, bristling with dead fennec furs and a flutter of green silk at her throat. Her one concession to human fashion. The bystander did not alter his pose. He did not move to make less of himself. She stared, she glared, and then Madame de Fer began to turn.

Vivienne looked impassively upon the empty balcony. She could almost see the ripple of air where it had been disturbed. The fluff of the carpet pushed the wrong way by a wayward heel. “I do have to apologise,” she lamented. “There’s been an influx of _crows_ inside the roof. Making a nest for the winter, or away from those dreadful tears and demons.”

Niamh’s stare did not waver from the balcony. He had slipped into the shadows as though he belonged to them, that strange and slender figure, a delicate but simple silver mask slid over the bridge of his nose. The tips of his ears tucked into a swooping hat, heavy with a pheasant’s feather. It had reminded her of another vision she had suffered many years ago, of a wolf with six red eyes, measuring her meat; her worth.

Vivienne de Fer’s cool hand touched hers. She measured her as well, but differently. With almond eyes that had a light shimmering blue painted over their dark lids, framed by perfectly coiffed lashes and a set of delicate high cheeks. This was diplomacy, Niamh realised. Walking into the den of that very same predator, facing down her fears and her demons which had haunted her from the day she had learned to say _Dalish_.

“You are welcome to the Inquisition, Madame de Fer,” she heard herself say. It didn’t sound like her.

It terrified her.


	9. IX.

“_The boy could not look away from the glow. He was enthralled, and the pain and the tears were forgotten. ‘See? This is magic,’ I said to him. ‘When you are older, I will teach you.’ _”

\- from _The Memoirs of Enchanter Reva Claye_

_ _

She woke in an abrupt cold sweat, suffering a sharp chill that ran the length of her spine even as she lurched upward. Her braid was messy, a malformed thing that tickled her naked shoulder. Niamh hugged her knees, the tug of the blanket following in turn.

There had been great debates only earlier in the day. A confrontation days, weeks, in the making, ever since they had crossed paths with Grand Enchanter Fiona in Val Royeaux. For those sennights, it had been as though they were all held in a crystal vial together. Mage had mingled with knight; elf had mingled with human and dwarf. Public perception was a distant dark cloud that insignificantly besmirched the horizon.

But they needed allies. Allies to seal the Breach once and for all. Where Niamh’s mind had followed the Grand Enchanter, sensing a united goal there, Cassandra Pentaghast had stalwartly suggested the templars. _The templars._ The mere thought of them, fighting alongside them, stung the Dalish. She had never been forcefully recruited to a Circle – Keeper Deshanna would have never allowed it – but she had heard enough tales. Seen enough sneers; enough sleepless nights where the clan was abruptly woken, moving camp before the _shem_ grew too bold on their boundaries.

She had snapped her teeth like a wolf, and Lady Pentaghast had met her, rearing head-on. The meeting had disbanded with ill feelings. The sense of unrest had spread through Haven as a whole.

She stood without thinking, padding to the door of the hut. She had made it her abode, this place of sickness and harpooned memories. They drifted back to her still, on occasion – flashes of green lightning, the cold biting beneath her hides. Solas touching her wrist, holding her hand toward a rift in the air. As she stared up at the two moons which cradled each other in the sky, she found herself wondering if he looked up at them too. If he was awake. He certainly hadn’t been in her dreams with her.

Niamh was glad for that, just for tonight.

Haven, the village, had flourished under watch of the Inquisition. As she stepped out into the midnight blue, she wondered if it was an arrangement that could last. Sooner or later, the _shem_ would find excuse to chase them from the land. There had already been quarrels incited with Lady Montilyet, that warm, smiling scribe who had overseen so many of Niamh’s meetings with the Inquisition heads. She batted them away expertly, but even the Dalish knew such diplomacy was only a temporary thing. When harsh words came short, what followed would be harsh, forceful hands.

Niamh didn’t want to leave. Her clan would not know where to find her, if indeed they would come searching for her. They would think she had abandoned them, or that she had died at the Conclave. Worst of all, Niamh did not think that they would mourn her.

“Can’t sleep?”

She had begun to take the flickering campfires for granted, she had stopped checking them for the dubious shapes of _shem_. She blinked, settling her gaze on the red-haired dwarf who made perpetual perch by the flame. He was finishing up his letter that he had been hemming over for such a long while, usually where Lady Pentaghast couldn’t see him. She felt a twinge of amusement that he didn’t bother hiding it from her.

“Dreams,” she whispered. Varric had to tilt his head to hear it proper, but after a moment, he nodded.

“I hear those are particularly troublesome for mage-y types. Not that I’m criticising. Hell, I get nightmares just hearing _Cassandra_ walking round the next corner. She’s putting some weight in those heels lately.” He paused. “Don’t let her throw you around like one of those dummies, Fangs.”

“I don’t intend to.” Niamh paused, her arms wrapped around the furs she had pulled over herself in departing the hut. She scrutinised his letter as the fire slicked its pool of light over the inked words. “Who are you writing to?”

“This thing? It’s for an old friend, but you keep that between us two.”

She smiled, and he seemed surprised by the gesture. In return, he gave her a crooked one back. He was rugged, but in an amicable way. Though she did not fully trust him, perhaps not as much as she did Solas, she recognised him as a figure of warmth. Of good, whatever that word meant to him. Cassandra treated him as a rapscallion, but Niamh had the impression he was doing the best for what he considered to be right. She would be the last to dictate him on whether or not he was wrong.

“Sit with me,” he suggested. “Nothing keeps the nightmares away like a warm fire. Maybe something to drink. What’s your poison, Fangs? I could scrounge something up for you – sweet talk Flissa.”

“You don’t need to.” She sat next to him on the log, pulling the furs in tighter around her. She saw the flicker of worry touch his brow briefly. She couldn’t say why. She hadn’t been particularly kind to Varric. “You are writing to Hawke?”

“Perceptive.”

“It’s why you’re hiding the letter from Cassandra.”

A breathy chuckle left the dwarf. The gold rings in his ears caught the firelight, twinkling like stars in close proximity. Her eyes were drawn to them time and again. “She doesn’t understand the strain it puts on someone, being the person everyone looks to for answers or – or saving the world.” He set the letter aside, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. A meaningful look was cast Niamh’s way. “And now she’s afraid, because all her life, the Chantry’s taught her the herald of Andraste can’t _possibly_ be a mage. Maybe not even an elf. She’s lashing out, and … I can understand why.”

“Then you show her more understanding than she shows you.”

“I bet. That doesn’t mean she isn’t _wrong_. But – you see why Hawke’s my little secret? Imagining him where you’re sitting … believe it or not, you’re doing better than he ever could.”

Niamh’s brow pinched. “I thought … isn’t he your friend?”

“He is. He’s my friend who’s been through some hard shit. Last time I saw him, he was going grey. Had a look in his eye like … ” Varric sighed. “I wouldn’t trust him not to be a martyr. I don’t want that. We don’t need any more martyrs.”

“I’m sorry.”

He seemed surprised again. “_Sorry?_ We should be thanking you, Fangs. From what I hear, the mages _will_ be thanking you. You see things in a way that those big heads don’t. You see the heart of where people come from. The justice that … they really don’t get. You’re important. We can’t afford to lose you, as difficult as that might be to hear.”

“You think I’m going to run, still?”

“I think you’re losing your colour,” the dwarf stated simply. “I think you’re getting crushed in a couple of hands that don’t know how to handle a flower.”

“I’m not a flower.”

“No. Flowers don’t have fangs. But you’re softer than you look.”

Niamh settled her gaze on the firelight, her frown failing to recede. She did not like that the dwarf thought he knew her, and she liked even less that he was not wholly wrong. So she made herself smaller on the log. It was her habitual answer to confusion – one that she hated. She should be bigger. Never smaller.

“Leliana said that there are assassins,” she announced flatly, “hired to kill me. Cassandra said that my seeking out the mages in Redcliffe will only fuel them to disrupt the Inquisition. Do you think that’s reason enough to turn to the templars?”

“_Me?_ You’re asking _my_ advice?”

“You’re neither a mage, nor a templar. Neither elf nor _shem_. You see things differently, I can tell. Maybe even objectively.”

Varric loosed another hoarse chuckle. “I’m flattered. And I’ll be honest, Fangs – I wouldn’t want to touch those rebel mages with a ten-foot pole. They scare me.”

“The templars don’t frighten you?”

“Oh, _they_ do too. You see why you shouldn’t ask me for advice?”

Quiet settled between them. Unlike the days prior, the silence they shared was not stilted. Perhaps all they had needed was for either one of them to reach out with kindness, and a natural friendship would follow. With the Champion of Kirkwall on her mind, the stars goading her from above with their distant spark, Niamh heard herself ask, “What would he have done? Hawke?” She did not receive an immediate answer, and she quickly glanced over Varric, to see if she had prodded a fraction too far. Rather than look offended, he appeared tired. Thoughtful.

“Not something you would have liked,” the dwarf said finally. When their eyes met again, his expression was apologetic.

“You’re _exhausted_, Leliana. Please. Rest.”

Josephine’s voice broke through the red woman’s reverie. In all honesty, she had slipped away into her thoughts, lulled by the peaceful breeze and the crispness of the Frostback Mountains upon her cheeks. Memory had laid its claim to her, seducing her back to younger years. Simpler times. Not necessarily for the world at large, but for herself.

Right and wrong had seemed so clearly defined, then.

“You’re starting to sound like Justinia,” Leliana chided. She turned her face over her shoulder, eyeing the Antivan ambassador. She, of course, bore no resemblance to the departed Divine – but the concern, the kindness, on her face reminded Leliana again of olden days. She had once been that hopeful voice to someone else. “I’ll be fine, Josie. You’re fretting.”

“_Fretting_ implies that there is nothing to fret over. I _know_ you, Leliana.” The ambassador’s grim visage softened by a finger’s width. “Cassandra and the herald _will_ see eye to eye. There is no option other than to be unanimous. We can’t afford anything else.”

“No. But we must support the decision wholeheartedly, no matter our personal feelings.” A faint frown twitched Leliana’s pale skin. She had taken refuge in one of the tents pitched outside the Chantry, affording her a clear celestial view, as well as an overlook of Haven. Josephine stepped further into its shelter, wrapping her arms around herself without thought. She was so happily transparent, the red woman quietly envied her.

“Something is troubling you,” the ambassador noted. Sometimes, Leliana forgot that she had been a bard as well. To survive it, she had to be made of steel, and couldn’t be underestimated. “Ever since Madame de Fer’s missive to you.”

The missive had arrived quietly, in the midst of Cassandra’s heated row with Niamh. Leliana had managed to comb over it quickly, though not before Josie had noticed. Smart, pretty Josie – silver of tongue and quick of eye. Envy was replaced by the briefest flush of affection. Of course, the spymaster had obscured nothing. Plainly, she had laid out Madame de Fer’s information to all, no matter how covertly Vivienne had desired to let Leliana know. The herald’s survival was paramount.

Yet, the news lingered still, just as Josephine surmised. Leliana allowed herself a soft, near plaintive sigh.

“When was the last you heard of the Antivan Crows, Josie?” Her voice was cloaked with innocence, but her question was pointed, with purpose. Josephine hesitated, her shadow wavering between the draperies of the tent. When she focused, her face scrunched in a familiar, endearing way, enough to again tickle a smile into the corner of Leliana’s mouth.

“Their influence has always been – _undeniable_, in Antiva,” she answered carefully. She searched Leliana’s face, looking for the truth to fill in the gaps. Clever, not to fully reveal her hand before she saw the array of the deck. The spymaster stepped to meet her in turn, folding her hands casually behind her back, though she felt anything but nonchalance.

“Of course. _They_ are the true princes of Antiva. Or _were_. Now the House of Repose is expanding its reach from the borders of Orlais, and the Crows have been too distracted to corral their business, let alone carry through on their _numerous_ contracts.”

“I … suppose you are not entirely incorrect. Still, their name carries great weight. If they _are_ targeting the Herald – ”

“I don’t think they are. And that worries me.”

Confusion ruffled Josephine’s exterior like the frilly folds of her collar. “Do you think Madame de Fer has been misinformed?”

“No. She would not have come to me if she wasn’t entirely sure.”

“But you doubt her.”

“Not _her_. Her sources. No-one knows what has befallen the Crows. It would be easy to sight them, and to assume they are fulfilling their contracts.”

Josephine’s dark eyes narrowed. Realisation fluttered through her features like the dapple of sunlight. “_You_ know,” the ambassador accused. “_That_ is why you are so – far away.”

“I have my suspicions.”

“Then why didn’t you say anything? The more information we have, Leliana – ”

“I trust him.” The readiness with which she spoke those words, those three unfamiliar words, deeply unsettled the spymaster. She had learned, against everything, to trust _no-one_ – yet all this memory had tinged and softened her. It was foolish. It could very well be a mistake. He might have changed, after all. He might have gone down a darker path than even _she_ could imagine. Josephine’s brow furrowed once more, overtaken by confusion, her realisation dampened by Leliana’s cryptic words.

“ – _Him?_” There was almost a note of betrayal there that Leliana had not confided in her sooner. _Oh, Josie. If only you understood._

“He was a Crow, once. When I saw him last, he was seeking revenge.”

“On who? What does the Herald have to do with an Antivan Crow’s vengeance?”

“Nothing. _That_, is why I am worried.”

Josephine began to fidget, her hands that were usually so preoccupied with parchment and quill now kneading fingers, one over the other. “We should tell the others,” she insisted. “It’s only fair to her. All this has happened so suddenly, now her life is at stake … ”

“Her life was _always_ at stake, Josie. Surely you aren’t so daft.”

The ambassador flinched, then steeled herself. “No, Leliana. _We_ put her life at stake. _We_ allowed word to get out – allowed them to think her the _Herald of Andraste_. Everything she denied, we allowed them to think. We _cannot_ shirk our responsibility.” She pressed her lips together, brown eyes flashing. “What is his name? I will track him down, even if you won’t.”

Weariness bled into every limb of the spymaster. She held out a hand, both consoling and apologetic. “No. You are right. I will learn all I can of his motives, Josie. I won’t let him harm her.”

“His name, Leliana. If we’re to work together on this, you _must_ tell me.”

She struggled, but inevitably that old name broke free of her, like the last stopper in the vials of her past. What flowed in their freedom was something bittersweet – something that clogged the back of her throat, no matter how clear and empty she kept her outward face.

“Zevran. The _Black Shadow_ of Antiva.”


	10. X.

“_As the moth sees light and goes toward flame,  
She should see fire and go towards Light.  
The Veil holds no uncertainty for her,  
And she will know no fear of death._”

\- Transfigurations 10:1

The morning was already bleeding into the dark velvet of the sky when Niamh picked her way back to the hut. Whatever lay ahead of her in the day, she knew that she must stand her ground. Even if she was no Herald, even if she was but an elf from the Lavellan clan gone rogue, she could make a difference here. Not just for her own kind, but for others – for the mages’ rebellion in its entirety.

She felt his shadow, his presence, before she saw him. She turned on the spot, meeting him as his hand fell upon the cusp of her arm. The breath tangled in her throat.

“Solas,” she breathed out. She had been on edge, always on edge. She wanted to scold him for stepping so quietly, but a part of her admired him for it. He would have made a good hunter, in another life. Currently, in that strange twilight before the full dawn, his eyes glittered with that peculiar intensity she had grown to link so intimately with his person. Niamh could never tell where that passion originated from. She could never read his thoughts. It was like having a word on the tip of your tongue, but losing your language in the reverie.

“I was worried,” he spoke. “You evaded sleep.”

“Sleep evaded _me_. And you worry too much.”

At once critical and tender. It was the sort of care that had been taught to Niamh by Keeper Deshanna. Do not be blinded by fondness, but do not lay into the skin of your loves with stroke after stroke of sharp words. It had been a difficult concept to grasp in youth. After all, in those impulsive days, it was easier to give in to one extreme or the next. She had always told herself she would grow out of it. Much to her dismay, no matter what she feigned, she never had.

Solas seemed to read those things – those thoughts – that flickered and wisped away in the shadows of her eyes. He didn’t step away, retrieve his hand, resume propriety. Niamh wondered if he was offended, somehow, that she had broken away from routine. For a dark, flickering moment, she considered if he thought of her as some pet. Some malleable thing to shape through dream visitations, to further his own end, of which she still knew so little about.

“I want to help,” he spoke softly. “I understand you are under great pressure – ”

“You needn’t act the sage. I’m sure the entirety of Haven heard the great Inquisition’s debate.”

He paused. “And you avoided sleep.”

“Sleep avoided me.”

“Do the details matter so much?”

She pulled her elbow from the burning points of his fingertips. Burning, not because little candle flames danced on the points of his nails as she thought they might, but because her blood pooled beneath her flesh wherever he touched. And the thought of what that could do, what he could be capable of with such a heady influence, deeply unsettled her. “The details matter the most,” she spoke quietly. “I can’t run away with you to play in dreams every single night, Solas. Or does _that_ matter so much?”

_Say it_, she challenged him without speaking. He stared into her face, and she glared into his. And then that tiredness which she insisted had so eluded her finally fluttered into her bones, coming with the realisation that he wasn’t one who would admit things so readily. Defeat. Weakness. Fondness. She turned from him with an air of finality, but this time he grasped her far more firmly, spinning her around into him, her free hand scrabbling at his chest for purchase. They were lit up by the dawn, she thought. Anyone could see them, if they cared to. Soldiers just waking. Birds drowsily twittering. Masked men who watched from balconies, and then disappeared into the shadows without a trace.

The fire came into her mouth, his lips sealed on hers. Her fingers dug in and in until she thought sparks would catch from her own claws, like flint to the fur that draped over his shoulders. She scraped her teeth over his bottom lip. He squeezed her into him until a sharp ache came into her ribs, and then below. It was not beautiful. Not particularly romantic. They tore away from each other as if they had been rightly burned. When she looked into his visage, past the shock, she saw dismay. It was as much of a wound as if she had accidentally stepped onto a stray arrow head, leaving blood and a limp. As though it was so terrible to draw close and kiss her. As though she was, in the end, nothing more than a wild and untamed pup.

Her feet quickened before he could regain his senses. She closed the door of the hut between her and him, closing him out of her mind and body, both of which he was gaining too much familiarity with. She shoved her shoulder against the wood of the door, her lips still tingling, her cheeks flushed bright with shame.

_What are you doing, banal’ras?_

In that moment, she was acutely aware of where she was; where she did and did not belong. She waited until the crisp crack of grass underfoot signalled his departure. She waited until the birdsong lengthened and grew in confidence, in tandem to her own waning surety. When laughter spilled forth from the breakfast fires, she slid down onto the damp floor, still soft from the chill and the snowfall, and pulled her knees in against her chest, gathering what warmth from her bones that she could.

Only then, once assured that she was completely alone, did Niamh of clan Lavellan allow herself to cry.


	11. XI.

“_Elves ambushed us just when the Master said they would, five days into the Wilds. They move faster than any elf I've seen, and they know the forest like they were born of it. The ones who escape melt back into the shadows. They're strong, and they know no fear; every damn elf we cut down fights 'til the last._”

\- excerpt from a charred logbook

Zevran Arainai had been in this situation more than once before. The situation was, of course, that he was prone upon the ground, posed a little scandalously, a dribble of crimson running from the cracked corner of his mouth. One eye was beginning to seal shut from swelling, but he was more wounded in his pride than he was in his vanity. What a grand tumble he had taken, from standing tall at Madame de Fer’s party to shivering and wincing upon a leaf-strewn puddle.

Well. He was not exceedingly tall, but that was no matter.

The elf girl prodded him again with the tip of her spear, uncomfortably near certain parts of his anatomy that he wished to keep intact for future leisure. Once again, he held up his hands in a friendly, _have mercy_ sort of gesture – the sort of language he was beginning to learn the Dalish did not speak very well.

“Following,” he spoke through chapped lips, “is a, _eh_. Strong word.”

The spear prodded harder. This particular elf girl had smooth tan skin, with _vallaslin_ bearing the mythology of Mythal curling over sharp-boned cheeks. Beneath the slender dark branches, her eyes were an impossibly darker, almost black hue. Zevran could not make heads nor tails of the expression that beguiled him from therein. She was trying to hurt him, but she was also sparing him – a fact he was struggling to take into account in a smooth, unlaboured manner. Behind her, a line of her hunting ilk watched him with far more passionate, angry gazes. Tensions were not unreasonably high, given recent events. And now that the Inquisition had officially taken up stance with the mages, Zevran had seen the most insular communities at best grow even more – _hostile_.

“Cut him where it hurts the most, _falon_. Then we will leave him to bleed and weep.”

_Oh no._ Zevran nimbly tucked his feet beneath him. In that space between the girl processing her companion’s words, then bracing her spear for impact, he rolled head over heels and elegantly found purchase, on the flipside, upon the soles of his feet. His dark hood rode up over tousled golden hair, his amber eyes sparkling with adrenaline even amidst a very stark threat. The slightest of movements set all the Dalish off at once. As he danced between the trees, he felt as well as heard the fletching of an arrow speed by his ear.

“_I confess!_” he sang into the whistling air. Slender birch bodies blurred out of his periphery vision. He judged his path by the crunching of matted soil and jutting of gnarled roots rather than by sight. When his back hit a broader trunk, he paused there momentarily to catch his breath. “I confess!”

Confusion was the answer. They had lost sight of him. He would feel somewhat proud of the fact, if he also did not want to make amends for his misdemeanour.

“I _was_ following you, yes. All of you. Not the girl in particular. I desired to see your camp. I am a lonely, hungry wanderer – fugitive from the _shem_. I seek only a haven with my brethren.”

“_Harellan!_ You are no Dalish!”

Zevran spit blood from the side of his mouth, closed his eyes, then darted to the next tree. The fresh outbreak of sound sent another baker’s dozen of arrows singing through the air, punctuated with a sharp cut of a flung spear as it chipped bark from his new shelter. He squeezed down low to the ground, wincing as his tender ribs made contact with another thick, merciless root.

“I was taken as a child! I grew up by the cruel hand of a Tevinter mage! He marked my cheek with three lines so I might never escape my fate!”

Akin to a chorus of boos, another fresh wave of arrows hit a neat line – _thunk, thunk, thunk_ – across the height of the slightly angled tree. Angled enough that the last pierced the ground before Zevran’s eyes, momentarily crossing them in bewilderment. “_Maldición_,” he breathed.

“Show yourself, _seth’lin!_”

_Time to go_, he thought. At a half crouch, he focused intently not on his immediate surroundings, but on the shape of shadow that he could meld into. The colours that would not remain stark against his dark clothing, marking him as a foreign invader. This time, when he moved, the leaves made no sound. His heels left the lightest of imprints upon the earth. Were he escaping from the usual clumsy rabble of guard, he could be confident he would escape without a trace. With these trained Dalish hunters, Zevran was a little less sure. Their obstinate, indignant cacophony was growing softer in his ears. He dared to inhale a little sharper, filling the breadth of his bruised stomach.

Then, a staff slammed down into the packed soil before him.

“Am I interrupting?” A Dalish elf with snow-white hair, flowing out in lazy waves from a sharp, creased face, peered down at him in a thoughtful, if still derisive, squint. As he stared up at her, the hunters fell into place behind him. At least now, they did not pepper him with arrows or prod him with spears. The reverence with which they held their quiet suggested that, in all his luck, Zevran had crawled into the Keeper of their clan. Slowly, again with his hands up, the Antivan elf rose. His hood had fallen completely away from his head now, revealing the scrapes, the bruises, the notably handsome visage that had been used to its greatest manipulative extent. The old Dalish Keeper took all of this in, lingering on those three curving lines he had spoken of along his high left cheek.

“You are not Dalish,” she measured, “and you are more than _seth’lin_. A great shadow is following you.”

“Deshanna,” the Mythal-marked girl spoke. She had retrieved her spear, and now she tucked it in proudly to her side, her chest puffed out. “He was tailing us, like we are the hunted and not the hunter.”

“Then he has put you to shame, that he can follow your tracks, but you so easily lose his.” The one named Deshanna turned her gaze back to Zevran. There was a warmth to her eyes, he noted, even when she reproached him. Languidly, she waved a hand. “Join us, stranger. You and I could benefit from one another’s company.”

He smiled, for this was a language that he knew well.

It had been many years since he had last passed through a Dalish camp. Then, he had felt the outsider, but most of all, he had been offended by it. Offended that he, a city elf, was shunned from their threads of tradition. Offended that he, a city elf, was expected to empathise with their very same ritual. Now, he felt ambivalent. He looked over the pitched tents, the corralled halla, the mistrusting faces – and he found that he could, now, empathise with them. They were all haunted by something or another. All trying to survive in their own way. Deshanna Istimaethoriel watched him, and Zevran was aware that she watched him. He allowed her to surmise from his reaction, or lack thereof, what she would. Duly, she noted, “This is not the first that you have seen a Dalish camp.”

“No.” He paused, wondering if he should elaborate. Considering how short his theatrics had fallen earlier, perhaps as close to the truth as he could lean was the best route to go. “I have been once … twice.”

“Were my brethren more forgiving of your antics?” There was a note of humour in the question, though it remained half-barbed. He was, after all, still a stranger. Still _seth’lin_, even if it was to varying degrees. Her notion that a shadow followed him tugged gently at the drifting thoughts beneath his aching skull. Did the shadow follow him, or he the shadow? Were they not one and the same? His former colleagues would consider him the demon that licked out beneath the stars. Zevran breathed in again, slowly, his eyes fluttering shut.

Another encampment, once upon a time. A Grey Warden. A crown gliding over raven hair. Keeper Deshanna spoke again, her words falling softer.

“You have a tiredness, one not easily cured by sleep. Shimaya spoke truer than she knew. You are a hunter.”

Zevran opened his eyes. All at once, the noise – and most importantly, the familiar stink of numerous bodies packed in a contained space – overwhelmed his senses. He raised a slender hand to scratch at the scrape on his cheek, one lid blinking as its swollen companion remained somewhat slouched in its socket. He was remarkably Antivan in a landscape that was not – warm brown skin and sun-dried hair, sinuous and languid, with a cadence that was sharper, even sometimes breathier than Orlesian. Still, the lies earlier had stemmed from truths that he knew. He had walked the paths of the Tevinter Imperium. He had seen the elves that shadowed their masters. And those three lines that curved across his left cheek, they had come from a time when he himself could have been considered shackled. He had appealed to the Dalish with lies out of fear that his truths would be measured, and subsequently fall short. Always his fear, that falling out of arm’s reach of success.

As was his way of things, he sheathed those doubts and depth of feeling into a superficial smile, glancing Deshanna Istimaethoriel’s way. To complete the charming countenance, he cocked his head.

“_Hunter_ is too strong a word. I desire to learn more.”

Deshanna’s sage expression faded, muted once again by suspicion. “What is there to learn, _da’mi_? The quarrels of this world fall far away from my clan. The short-lived ones squabble amongst themselves for superiority in faith, unaware of the failings that have brought their demons to heel.”

“So you would deny that one of your own sits astride all such quarrels, the _Herald of Andraste?_”

The Keeper looked away. Zevran identified several of her expressions before she did. Shame. Anger. Forced indifference. “No elf of clan Lavellan represents Andraste,” she spoke simply. It was like looking through a mirror, seeing a version of himself ten years younger, squashing his resentment of the Dalish into something that looked like a superiority complex. Only, well – in his stead stood a girl upon whose shoulders rode the fate of this world. _Is that not the way of things? The ending of the world is shoved to the outcasts. The wardens, the assassins, the witches of the wild._ Zevran sighed, facing back forward. The huntress called Shimaya watched him from the central campfire, tending to the chipped shaft of her spear with a glowering look. He cast a wink toward her even as he spoke.

“She is in danger, this Herald. And I am fond of this world, in all its failings. I would like to see her live. I would like to see the _world_ live.”

“Why?”

He shifted, his back awkwardly propped against a barrel of dried meat. She stood in the opening of her tent, looking out among her people. The wind tousled her snowy hair, like a billowing mast upon a proud ship. She would carry the Dalish, he thought, to the ends of the earth – whether or not her spine broke along the way.

“There was a time when I desired nothing but death. In so surviving, I learnt the true value of life.”

“Pretty words.”

“And true.”

In time, the Keeper bowed her head. Away from the glow of the firelight, she looked as tired as she had claimed him to be. “Niamh was like a daughter to me,” she murmured. “She _is_ a daughter to me. But I cannot follow her on the paths that she takes. She must learn to make her own choices, even should they lead her into danger.”

“If that danger may be prevented, is the risk not worth a gamble?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything. And I would like a way to get close to her, if I may. It is difficult to save someone’s life when they refuse to trust.”

He felt Deshanna’s gaze pull at the skin of his cheek. By then, Shimaya had pointedly turned her back to him. The act did not fool him. Zevran knew she would listen to anything she could – any scrap of words uttered too loud that fell upon the wayward breeze. As if gleaning the images from his mind, the Keeper let loose a soft exhale.

“Shimaya will take you to her. If there is any from the clan Niamh will feel strongly for, it is her. I cannot leave my people. Not in these times of war.”

“War?” Zevran prompted simply. He leaned his head back until it touched upon the side of the barrel. She looked through and past him, the line of her jaw grinding to a contemplative heartbeat.

“It will come, _da’mi_. It will come.”


	12. XII.

“_Those who had been cast down,  
The demons who would be gods,  
Began to whisper to men from their tombs within the earth.  
And the men of Tevinter heard and raised altars  
To the pretender-gods once more,  
And in return were given, in hushed whispers,  
The secrets of darkest magic._”

\- Canticle of Threnodies 5:11

The great double doors of the cavernous hall shuddered and groaned. Patterns of red lyrium swam upon Niamh’s gaze, blinding her, strangling her like a cold, dead hand that was bending her – bending her down, down, to the floor, until she was kneeling. She watched the splinters cave inward; gnarled hands reached forward, stained with the blood of those who would have fought beside her. Who would defend her even now, when the world was all but ruined. The red woman danced between the ink blots that stained the Herald’s vision, her visage now a mask of decayed and puckered flesh. Their eyes met between the shadows of advancing monstrosities. Niamh tried to inhale, but her air sputtered out in wheezing exhales.

An arm roped around her midriff. She was pulled into a vacuum of air that suffocated her completely. When she had slid through to the other side, she was gasping, scrabbling for purchase on the tiled floor. She thought she was dying. This felt like death. _Smelled_ like death. The arm receded from her waist, and firm hands grasped her shoulders, searched for the point of her chin.

“_Breathe_,” an imperious voice commanded. She choked and peered up into the face of the mage, Dorian Pavus. Remarkably identifiable by his exquisitely oiled moustache, coming to elegant points that shadowed his smooth brown cheeks. His fingers squeezed inward, and she saw a passage of kindness through his light eyes that softened the drumbeat in her ears. They were not out of danger yet. Now was not the time to give in to the furor of panic that wrecked her chest.

Gereon Alexius gazed upon them, first stupefied, then slowly sinking into realisation. He had failed. His attempt to twist time and space, to remove Niamh Lavellan entirely from the course of history, had backfired. He couldn’t know the extent of how. He couldn’t understand the significance of how he had transported her and Dorian both into a future where he had succeeded. Where her absence had dipped Thedas into the abyss; her companions into death. He had underestimated her, but foremost he had underestimated Dorian. The human – she wouldn’t be here without him. She wouldn’t have survived without him.

The great double doors of the cavernous hall shuddered and groaned. When they swung inward, a different sort of hush fell over all gathered.

“_The Queen and King of Ferelden_,” a crier announced. So did the monarchs’ shadows fall across the grand foyer of Redcliffe Castle. The king strode forth with the queen’s hand grasped within his – not delicately and courteously, but firm and shameless. As the queen passed between flickering torches, the light caught in her crown, clustered close to her lustrous raven hair. Dorian hastened to help Niamh to her feet, and the elf’s hand found purchase upon his arm and wouldn’t leave it. His kindness extended further, and he did not shake her off.

“I’m afraid this is the end of your charade, my friend.” There was no triumph in Dorian’s voice as he spoke to Alexius. Niamh understood too well the cadence of grief, of something lost that could never be regained. The queen and the king came to a polite stop some distance away from the scene of madness. The magister Alexius fell flatly to his knees, the sound reverberating across the distance that separated them.

“Fantastic,” the king spoke at last, breaking the eerie silence that had fallen between this triad of power. The Inquisition and a representative of the Tevinter Imperium on one end, and the rule of Ferelden on the other. “Here I was thinking it would all get a lot _messier_.” The queen, his counterpart, did not yet speak. She stood with a cool elegance that needed little vernacular to accompany it. Rather than look around the hall at large as her husband partook in, however, her withering gaze fell on the kneeling magister alone. After some moments, she looked up, registering the presence of his son who stood behind him.

“Felix, isn’t it?” When she spoke, she sounded as casual as her love, though her expression remained forbidding. “The birds have told me all about you and your father. I’m afraid Alistair and I had very little warning as to your – occupation, and what it entailed. What all _this_ entailed, in fact.” She gestured in a grand circle to the mages who had gathered, near _flocked_, to the scene of the unseen crime. These folk who had taken shelter in Redcliffe where none else would take them. Niamh could see the threads of welcome fraying here, and she could sense too their terror bubbling beneath their facades. The boiling blood of prey to the nose of a predator.

The predator snapped her eyes to Niamh. Queen Felicity Cousland shadowed her pale features with a twisting half-smile. Briefly, Niamh thought of Varric’s nickname for her. _Fangs_.

“Shall we talk?”

“It’s been so long,” the queen said absently. Niamh could not fully parse the way with which she looked upon these worn stone walls. The elf had seen stone come in many hues, and she found it more beautiful out in the wilds, where _shem_ hands didn’t cut away its roughness and mould it into uniform shapes. She had managed to wrest her breathing, her pounding heart, into something manageable. She hadn’t yet spoken. Perhaps this was the monarch’s way of provoking a reaction, an answer – a question as to what she meant. Instead, Alistair Theirin, the successor of Cailan Theirin and, briefly, Loghain Mac Tir, answered.

“Almost makes you miss it. Well – until you walk into your uncle’s castle and find it taken over by bloodthirsty mages and an upstart Inquisition.”

They were gathered somewhat awkwardly in the absent bann’s bedchamber. Once again, it was sectioned off. On one side, this time, the Inquisition was arrayed out in splendour. The red woman, Leliana, who had infiltrated the castle with her agents while Alexius had dealt with Niamh. Niamh’s companions, including the imperious mage who had pulled her back to the present, Dorian Pavus. Beside him was Solas, ankles crossed one over the other as he leaned against the wall, staff pressed into his chest. Next, a heavy-set, brooding man by the name of Blackwall. The latter was particularly hushed by the presence of king and queen, and had pushed himself into the far corner of the chamber as well as he could.

When Niamh looked upon them all, she saw shadows of them. Shadows of what she had seen when the magister Alexius had displaced her in time. Spectres haunted by red lyrium, hollowed out by a hopeless fervour. When she glanced over Leliana, she saw a woman vacated by torture. Skin mottled and rotted far beyond her age. Rather than respond to the Herald’s lingering glance, however, the red woman broke into a soft giggle.

“You’ve hardly changed, your majesty.”

The king groaned. “_No._ Don’t call me that. It’s majesty this, majesty _that_ – and it sounds so _weird_ coming from you.”

Slowly, Niamh looked back at Leliana. This time, the red woman caught her gaze. Flashed her a secretive, reassuring smile. _She doesn’t know_, the elf thought to herself. _She doesn’t know how I saw her tortured. Hanging rotten off manacles, ready to spit in my face for playing the hero. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know._

“I thought this one would talk more,” the queen remarked. Bedecked though she was in a flowing skirt of red organza, tight bodice with black applique, she sat upon a chair with a languid warrior’s cant. Her crown had been courteously removed from atop her dark hair, and her darker eyes bore into Niamh in all her silence. “Usually with grand titles come grand declarations.”

“She doesn’t believe herself the herald of Andraste,” Leliana answered. She too was at ease – all three of them were, king and queen and mistress of ravens. “She reminds me of someone I knew once, long ago. _Before_ she grew a crown on her head.”

“You make it sound like Alistair planted a seed in my hair while I was asleep. Watered it and watched it grow. Did you, my love?”

The king’s cheeks grew rosy with mirth and pride. “No. Didn’t even grow the rose I gave you.”

“Cheapskate.”

The trio laughed. It was a hearty display of camaraderie Niamh had witnessed beneath the stars, around the great campfire of her Dalish brethren. Hunters who had stalked down prey together. Students who whispered to each other during lessons, never paying heed. Inevitably the sound faded away; grew sombre. Niamh didn’t understand why until she realised they were all watching her again. The human queen stood, closed the distance between them. She was tall and lean. Not like a hunter. Niamh could imagine her bedecked in chainmail and pauldrons, a shield on her back, a long and wicked sword in her hand.

“You have the face of someone who’s seen something terrible,” the queen spoke softly. “I think Leliana might be right. I think we have much in common. But I’m not the wily hero that I once was, herald. I am a queen. This – this is my land. One I have sworn to protect until my dying breath, soon as that might be.”

Her dark eyes fell toward her lover, and Alistair Theirin silently bowed his head. Still, Niamh did not speak. The air in the room did not seem suited to her, her still raw and strangled throat.

“I’m told Gereon Alexius has surrendered himself to the Inquisition. As I see it, that makes him your problem to contend with. Unfortunately, these mages who seek shelter have been complicit in his crimes, whether they intended it or not. Should I turn a blind eye, my people will not forgive me.”

“They are your people too.” The words finally scraped forth. As Niamh had predicted, the air rushed back to the edge of her throat with an icy, drying hold. She swallowed and licked her lips. “The mages. You are their queen too.” The queen’s expression shifted. There was regret there. Understanding. But the divide between them – this Dalish girl and this _shem_ royalty – was too great. They were awkward adjacent one another. Niamh’s whisper was too coarse, too exposed, next to this queen’s dulcet drawl.

“You are a mage,” the _shem_ noted. “A talented one, I think. Else you mightn’t have survived before my husband and I walked through those doors. Tell me. What would you do with these mages, in my place?”

It seemed a test. A basis upon which the queen of Ferelden would judge her. Niamh’s gaze darted from her face to her husband’s, his light brown complexion and curious eyes. To Leliana’s, her expression muted as always. It was only in looking at Dorian that she thought she found threads of her answer, the flicker of a kind, tired smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. Then, when she looked into the visage of the hermit Solas, the threads steeled into resolve.

“You said they were complicit. If Gereon Alexius has surrendered to the Inquisition, if he represents the mages, then would you consider the mages surrendered to us as well?”

The arch of the queen’s brow prodded upward, the faintest pull at her otherwise still complexion. “What would you do?” she asked again. Niamh, with effort, pulled in her aching shoulders. She stood as tall as she dared in the face of a queen, then remembered that she was Dalish, her roots _elvhen_, and stood taller still. She would not let her fire sputter out now. Not here. _Not the time_, she reminded herself stalwartly. _Not now._

“If you won’t accept them as your people,” she said, “let them be mine.”

A stillness settled between them. No smile lingered on the faces that watched them so closely. Even then, Niamh could feel the pull of Solas’ gaze – how he stared so hard into her, as though with that gesture, he might read her mind. It had come to feel as though he could stir the fire beneath her skin with a simple glance. _Not the time_, her mantra continued, inwardly. _Not now._ The queen of Ferelden, once hailed as its hero – once stood in the shadow of a dragon corrupted by viscous, ravaging Blight – slowly tilted her chin up. That simple act alone marked their height incomparable. But then, she smiled. It was that same twisting half-smile from before – more genuine, Niamh realised, than any other learned countenance she bestowed upon her subjects.

“Very well,” she answered, so softly that the bat of a moth’s wings could have stifled the thought. Alistair opened his mouth in protest, but she threw a chiding, coquettish glance his way before he could utter his first syllable. “You are right, of course. Gereon Alexius _and_ his mages have surrendered unto the Inquisition. Have done so, in fact, before ever the king and queen of Ferelden strode through the doors of Redcliffe Castle. Some say they were all long vanished before these troubled monarchs set their gaze upon them.”

“You would release them so easily?” Leliana questioned. Gone was the shadow of a companionable laugh. Her gaze was intense and shrewd. “The law of surrender hardly overrules the law of territory.”

“The times are changing, Leliana.” The queen tore her dark gaze away from the herald before her. “I can feel it. No – hear it. The song … so sweet. Cruelly so.”

“_No._” The single word tore out of the red woman with such rawness, such hurt, that Niamh near flinched. She took a step forward, reaching out for the queen, pinching her wrist hard between thumb and forefinger. “It can’t be. It _can’t_. You don’t mean – ?”

“The Calling. Yes. I hear it. I’ve reached out to my brethren, attempted to, but they’ve scattered. It seems the end of something, doesn’t it? But with every end … ”

“A new beginning,” Leliana whispered. She blinked harshly, then seemed to remember herself. Her hand drew back, her spine straightened like a rigid rod. The king stood with his head bowed to the floor. Something had changed in the current of the room – something only those three shared. The queen moved her gaze – through Niamh, then Dorian, then Solas. Her pitch eyes lingered on the man who slumped in the corner, Blackwall, who himself had grown a great interest in the carpeting. _He is a warden too_, Niamh thought. _Is that what she meant? Her brethren?_

“The Grand Enchanter Fiona and her charges are hereby banished from Ferelden,” the queen intoned. “I trust them unto you, herald. And I wish you well.”

As the two monarchs made their sweeping exit, Leliana turned and glared toward that same corner. At first accusatory, she schooled herself. Still, it was not easy for Niamh to forget.

It reminded her so much of the fire in the red woman’s eyes as she fought to her death, in another world, in another time.


	13. XIII.

“_Patience is what you will learn. With no city to distract or tempt you, you will practice. You will fail. You will suffer. And when we are done, you will be a rock upon which demons break._

_Now let us begin._”

\- Lord Seeker Alderai, 7:70 Storm

Shimaya regarded Zevran as though he were the most repulsive being in Thedas. The river water ran in cool rivulets down his brown skin, blessing him with a sensation of cleanliness that the wilderness had left him sorely lacking. He was not completely immodest, his back turned to her now as he scrubbed the slightly murky, emerald waters through his pale hair. Sunlight dappled the rippling surface. The thought crossed his mind briefly to cup the light in the palm of his hand, then fling it at her sour face.

He knew, vaguely, that Redcliffe was not so far away. He had not visited it in years, had not even thought of doing so. It had been easier to wrap it all up into a neat chapter, never to be resumed. Was it undying optimism that once the world was righted, it would never spin off its axis again? Or was there too much misery dredged between the heroics that he had yearned, for the longest of times, to avoid? He tossed his head back, his lengthy hair painting a glittering, dewy arc through the air. At least snow wasn’t on the ground, and the water hadn’t been frozen over when he’d come upon it.

“How much longer?” the Dalish demanded from behind him. He cast a glance over his shoulder, not for the first time, one slender brow risen.

“Well, first I will need my clothes. Bring them to me, will you?”

Immediately, she bristled. Zevran made a grand show of sighing before he turned about and waded through the waters toward his pile of discarded leathers and cloth. By the time he’d reached them, it was Shimaya with her back turned, the tips of her ears burning. He pretended not to notice, dragging a worn tunic over his head. His right eye was still slightly swollen, and the corner of his mouth that had been cut burned from the cold river. Regardless, he felt more refreshed than he had in days. So acclimated to the cities was he, he often missed out on that feeling of reconnecting with nature. Once, he would have bemoaned all of its atrocities – the buzzing insects, the merciless weather. Maybe, as he was getting older, his taste was growing more refined.

“Do you know where we are going?” he asked her. She turned her head, her dark eyes narrowed to slivers. Her arms were crossed over her chest, the shaft of her spear digging into her side.

“A village close to the mountain range. It will grow colder, as we go.”

“_Ah_,” Zevran let out in another sigh. Now he was tying up the leather armour over the shirt, feeling its warm and dry comfort. “I am not a man acclimated to the cold. I prefer the sun. The smell of sweat, the blood pumping … do you not agree?”

“Why should I like the smell of sweat?”

“Why would you not? It is the stench of passion.” When he glanced up again, her ears seemed to be glowing. His tone turned gentle and wry. “Passion is not always so singular, my dear.”

“I don’t know what you mean, _seth’lin_.”

“_Zevran_. Though I do not so mind my new title, when you say it in that way.”

“With disgust?” she snarled. He flashed her a crooked grin, running his hand through his dripping strands of hair.

“With _passion_.”

That was the theme of the day, he soon found. She would not meet his gaze, she huffed and she puffed, and when she could not find an answer to his proddings, she fell into surly silence. When that happened, Zevran admired their surroundings, spotting the familiar, then the unfamiliar. The land had the air of the ravaged – camps that had been quickly abandoned, or huts that were empty, yet still warm to touch. When he stopped by one such, sniffing around the windows, Shimaya broke her surly silence to comment that they had left their animals behind in the barn. That they would go hungry, starve, if no-one tended to them.

“We cannot bring them,” he answered her absently. The next moment, the air was alive and dancing with the sound of freed livestock. He watched with widened eyes as she let them depart from their cages, she some saviour with a stalwart profile. Still avoiding his gaze, but moving with purpose. Then, when they were gone, when the quiet had settled again, she turned to him with her hands on her hips, challenging him to defy her. “Imagine,” he said, “if we hadn’t been alone.”

“What does that mean?” she snapped.

“You and I, we like to move quietly, no? We would like not to be seen.”

She took two steps toward him. Suddenly, all her shyness had evaporated. She wore her Dalish pride on her face, in her eyes, in the cant of her lithe frame. “The _shem_ can see me if they like. I’ll gouge their eyes out for staring.”

He opened his mouth. She took another step forward.

“I’m not the one hiding, _seth’lin_. You’re hiding, though. You might have fooled Keeper Deshanna, but you won’t fool me.”

Zevran reached out. His hand closed over her mouth, and her eyes became large, round, indignant coins over the slope of her nose. When she began to struggle, hitting her fists against his chest, he pulled her against him and hissed into her ear, “_Hush_.” And there, in the distance, behind the soft braying of goats or brontos or whatever had been held captive in that abandoned barn, they heard voices. Promptly, Shimaya ceased her struggling. One hand went to her spear, and the other pried loose Zevran’s fingertips.

They slipped into the shadows together, parallel of each other. Half-crouched, him shrouded in crow-dark leathers, her blending into the greens and browns of nature with her furs and hides. The freedom of the beasts had attracted interest toward the empty hut – or perhaps they had been there all along, as Zevran had pondered only moments before. The familiar trappings of the Templar Order, of sunken, wild, blood-desperate faces. _This is wrong_, the Antivan thought to himself. _That is not the face of order, whatever their name._ Shimaya moved behind one of the Templars. Zevran saw her only moments before she held the spear to the man’s back. His brethren were still surfacing from the thin, sparse trees. The elf closed his eyes, exhaled. His feet scuffed through the grass soundlessly; his fingertips sought the knives sheathed at his sides.

They had begun to call him the Black Shadow of Antiva. Redundant, he’d always thought it, but his former colleagues had never been particularly creative, unless it came to the art of death or torture. He had begun to live the name. Move like a shadow, make sound like a shadow. He slipped the knife against one Templar’s throat, calculating the best route to minimise bloodshed. He didn’t know what had happened here, why they wore those hungry looks. He pictured mages fleeing, hiding. He thought of the conflict that had brought them all here to this singular point. As he imagined those things, Shimaya pushed the tip of her spear through a Templar who had drawn his blade, advancing upon Zevran with a curse fresh upon the his tongue. Their eyes met, and Zevran understood – this was no time for mercy.

He moved like he had been taught death was a dance. Their coarse shouts, cries of pain, were the music to which he had to move his feet, his hips. _She_ barely touched the ground, it seemed. Her weight never left a mark on the snow-sodden earth. Her spear cut through the air like a silver ribbon, staining darker and redder with each swerve up, each slash down. He was amazed, tantalised, at how they wove the choreography together. He had the leisure to appreciate the art of it even as he took life from the hungry Templar knights, and his conscience allowed him it. Allowed him to rejoice and revel.

She saw how they couldn’t have cut him if they tried. He was like oil, sliding out of reach, out of fingertips. Those bruises, those scrapes, that she and her brethren had dealt to him, he had _allowed_ them to – that was the only way she could reconcile the invincible web he wove now to the feeling of his bruised skin against her knuckles. His knives slid beneath the trappings of armour; found purchase where gleaming silver ended and tender meat began. He was a carrion bird picking clean their bones before ever they knew they were dead.

And they were dead, soon enough. They two stood over the strewn carcasses like guilty children caught with their hands in another’s purse. The drumbeat of survival ricocheted in their chests as only their kind knew how. When he looked at Shimaya, he understood that, had she been anyone else – another woman, another time – he would have fought differently. He would have fought to spare, not to kill.

The flexibility of his identity disconcerted him.

“_Zevran_,” she hissed. Not _seth’lin_, not a disparaging nickname. She pushed at him and he turned about, seeing similar, ghost-struck faces surfacing from what he had considered to be an abandoned hut. A triad of mages, malnourished, hunted, mistrusting. And, of course, it all made sense. This was the song that the green-tinged air sang to him. This was the song that had been carried to him through whispers and bird chittering. Zevran flipped his knives points down, facing the earth. His fingers splayed out behind them, showing he meant no ill intent.

“Come,” he called over the distance. “I know where you will be welcome.”

Flickering ruby haze spread its web beneath his pale, near translucent skin. He looked upon her with a dull gaze, at first seeing her as a dream, then again seeing her as reality. They each stepped to meet the other, her hand wrapping around the cold, hard bar of his prison. The texture of it, the solidity, was also proof to her that this was real.

“You’re alive,” he whispered. “We saw you die.”

The prison twisted, puckered back into the stone walls. He tore away from her to hold the line, to keep the demons and the Venatori at bay as she found her way back through time. To mend. To prevent this ever from happening. His sacrifice. His torture. His long, abandoned imprisonment.

She shot up with a cry, clutching at her chest, struggling to breathe. His arms fell around her, his long, slender fingers tangling in the braid that had begun to spew forth stray, brittle hairs. There were long moments before she had presence of mind. Before she felt that she could inhale again without feeling strangled, uncontainable.

“Is this a dream?” she stammered. When he answered, his breath warmed the back of her head, flowing down her exposed nape.

“Yes.”

She wrapped her hand around his wrist, wordless for the moment. When he felt her chest rise and fall in calmed measures, that was when he pulled away, searching her face. Gone was the haunting of dark, cobweb red. There was concern in his features, but alarm as well. And beneath it all, the cold, sparkling intrigue of a scholar.

“I felt it kinder to pull you from your nightmare,” he spoke carefully. He had been tentative ever since their – whatever they had shared. Respectful of her boundaries. If he had not intervened, Niamh wondered if she would have been able to decipher her nightmare from her reality, now. So much of this still felt unreal. Unremembered. “Was it truly just a nightmare?”

The question was pointed, knowing. She averted her gaze as quickly as she had looked into his face. “A memory.” The words were dry and scratchy on her tongue. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had water. As easily as that, a pitcher appeared on the floor beside her bed. The eerie silence of Haven in dream-like reverie reminded her it wouldn’t be appropriate sustenance.

Slowly, Solas sat on the side of her bed. He had been quiet in Redcliffe, almost as though he were making himself smaller under the eye of queen and king. Niamh knew he wasn’t small at all. She knew that he was shrewd, that he knew more than he let on. And now, she thought, she knew that he would die for her – for the fate of the world. “The mage is worried for you,” he said after a pause. “He was with you, through it all.”

_Of course._ She hadn’t suffered that terrible future alone. The _shem_ – the human had been with her. The vision of his kind smile fluttered beneath her eyelids.

It had been days now since their confrontation with Alexius, but Niamh had hardly been the grand herald all expected her to be. Between the uncertainty of her memory surrounding the Conclave, the uncertainty of her current reality, she had begun fraying at the edges far more than would do anyone good. _Not now_, she would keep telling herself, but a fragile mind is not a patient one. It helped little that the Inquisition seemed to mistrust her for bringing the mages into their ranks. The mages and the soldiers did not mingle, each apparently impatient for a time where they could be separate, free, once again. That rode on the herald’s willingness to approach and close the Breach once and for all. Dorian had insisted it was better to wait than to risk over-extending her capabilities. All the while, the mark on her hand flickered and grew erratic, as though mirroring her torment of confusion within.

It was all quite simple, really. She wanted to go home. She wanted to be free of this – this _place_. This responsibility. These haunting images of people she barely knew dying for her, again and again. How many already had? Ones she had never learnt the names of. Ones she never would.

“Niamh.” His voice broke her out of her thoughts. She felt the brush of his thumb across her cheek. “You’re crying.”

She was startled, as much as he was. Instinctively, she pulled away from his touch, scrubbing at the freckled bridge of her nose with her forearm. Only then, hunched inward, almost turned away from him, did she say, “I watched you die.” His hand paused in the air, wavering uncertainly. He was always so much the opposite. So sure of his purpose, of what to do next. Now, faced with his own mortality, Solas appeared bewildered.

“When?”

“When the _shem_ tried to be rid of me. He sent us into the future. A future where we – where I failed.”

Solas didn’t appear any less perplexed. He folded his hand into his lap and contemplated the air before him, the quiet seeding between them. “I see,” he murmured at length. “Would I be wrong in assuming that I was not the only … sacrifice?”

She shook her head. The warden Blackwall had put out his own life in the same breath as Solas. The red woman had been the last, and her hollowed gaze still haunted Niamh. She had thought, as Dalish, that she knew death. As the cursed pup, she had thought herself wreathed in it. It bewildered her how simple her existence had been in comparison to this. Would she change it all? Would she go back? It could have been anyone but her.

His hand touched her knee, fingertips combing up the exposed skin. Suddenly, all her focus was upon that brief graze. Piercing through the haze of dream and nightmare, like a splash of light through a dark storm cloud. This was real. It was in a dream, but she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt – it was _real_.

“You have not failed,” he told her softly. “Rather, you have persevered. You have bargained wit and favour with the queen of this very land. What other success could measure akin to yours?” His head tilted, and she saw kindness in his gaze; kindness she had yearned to see. His smile transformed his sharp visage. “Who could blame you for bathing in doubt? We revere you. We are dependent. If I could share your weight … if you would let me – ” His eyes fell to her lips. Chastened, then, he withdrew his hand. A familiar sting returned to her heart.

_I am ugly. I am weak. He should be ashamed, and so should I._

“You are unlike anything I expected to find here,” he continued. “You are – breathtaking.”

Then came the absence of thought. As though he had closed the door upon them, or drawn her beneath a barrier. The doubts met a sharp end, replaced instead by a numb, confused shock. He would not look at her. He studied the fold of his hands as though it were easier to speak the truth to them than to her.

“I speak too much,” Solas concluded. “Or perhaps not enough. I should allow you your rest. It would mean little for me to spare you your nightmares, then take from you your sleep.”

“Solas – ”

“Please. My resolve is not so strong, with you.”

Her lips remained parted, poised on words that wouldn’t come even as he rose. He did finally look into her face, that faint smile lingering, bashful, wry. Before she could ask him what he meant, what he needed resolve for, she blinked and the world of dream fled from her. A fire was still crackling in her hut as she roused, bathing its plank walls with a fluttering glow. Niamh thought it mirrored her heart as she watched it, learning to breathe again. It was not so much that she was strangled now, but that he had taken her breath with him.


	14. XIV.

“_The sun, looking down upon the fruitful land, saw the joy that Elgar'nan took in her works and grew jealous. Out of spite, he shone his face full upon all the creatures the earth had created, and burned them all to ashes._”

\- Gisharel, Keeper of the Ralaferin clan, from _The Tale of Elgar’nan and the Sun_

She could not say how one evening the world could appear so fruitless and bleak, and yet the next be full of joy and hope. She dared not think that Solas’ words could have swayed her so easily, for to think such would be to admit she was some love-struck sap. It was easier, she thought, more _rational_ to attribute high spirits to the success that he had spoken of. Success in giving the mages shelter. Success in sealing the Breach.

It was the mages’ power. It was the power in knowing that she had trustworthy warriors by her side, whether they took the shape of the familiar – Dorian, Sera, Cassandra, Madame de Fer – or whether they took the shape of the less so, such as Blackwall, or the mercenary leader known as the Iron Bull. Niamh would be deceitful if she didn’t credit the powerful swell of her heart and confidence to spotting the outline of the Bull’s great horns against the flickering sky. The imposing Qunari could have sealed the Breach, no doubt, with but a single maniacal grin from his weathered, one-eyed face.

What happened instead, of course, was that she lifted her hand to the scar in the air and, as though the world breathed a great sigh around her, the Breach exhaled and slowly mended its emerald tendrils. It was so simple, so easy, that she was left standing prone before the now empty space, her fingers trembling lightly from adrenaline and disbelief. Then, the mages who had brought up her rear, who had lent their power to hers to eliminate the nightmare with a whisper and not a scream, erupted into cheers that echoed her floating heart.

Slowly, the Dalish elf smiled. Then, with a wolf-like grin, she spun around and joined in their celebrations with a raised fist and a cry of her own.

Niamh Lavellan did not feel herself. Once upon a time, she had stayed out of the firelight of her peers. She had been cocooned into isolation, the outcast cursed with Fen’Harel’s wandering eye. Now, she was the hero. _Their_ hero. All thought of Andraste, the Divine, the implications of her status – they were banished. Instead, they all clung onto the tangible and the witnessed. She had closed the Breach. _She_ had done the impossible. Though the mark burned brightly, peculiarly, still in the palm of her hand, she looked upon it as a victory. A scar of pride to match all the rest.

So she danced, as she had once seen others do. She sang, as she had once listened to others do. The cup in her hand contained a strong liquor she did not know the name of. She found herself sharing laughter with the Pentaghast woman as though they were two hunters fresh from slaying the wolf in the forest. The _shem_ melted into the mages, the mages into the soldiers, the soldiers into the sparse elves, all of them unmarked yet still her brethren.

Her arm hooked around a familiar, slender hand. She pulled Solas with her into the basking, orange glow – admired how it lit stars into his eyes as he gazed down at her in the reverence he’d spoken of. In something more flushed and primal than she could recall casting over his features. “Dance with me!” she cried over the general ruckus. He stepped closer even as he shook his head.

“I do not know how to!”

“Follow my lead. No, put your hand there. You’re being shy!”

He was. He was cupping her waist as though she was a flower. As though he would crush her stem. When she demonstrated boldness, she glimpsed hunger pierce through his visage. Every part of her lit up to match the bonfire that warmed their side. Her grin, her bared teeth, encouraged him.

“Torchlight catching on her crown. It slides over her hair; a _sigh_. You don’t realise until the nightmares come to save you that the sigh was yours.”

Zevran’s head snapped up. Their campfire had begun to be a place he dreaded, namely for this particular reason. The boy, half-sunken into the large brim of his hat, his gaze obfuscated by a messy fall of yellow hair besides, spoke in broken riddles. At least, that was what it had appeared to be on the surface. The Antivan was quickly learning that the more the boy spoke, the more it was apparent that he knew too much. He twisted about, narrowing his eyes.

This was not a group of three mages that they had stumbled across, as he had initially assumed. Rather, there were two mages – a pair of weary, bedraggled sisters – and this … well, he didn’t feel particularly human, no matter how solid and mortal he appeared to be. Pale, haunted eyes ran the gauntlet over the elf’s face, their colour hard to pinpoint when sparse strands of a fringe interrupted clear sight. Just when Zevran thought he’d memorised the boy’s appearance, it fled him the moment he turned his head. _Yes_, he told himself. _That is what is setting me on edge._

“May I ask you a favour?” he spoke, short and impatient. The boy lifted his head a little more with interest. Zevran had barely traded three words with him beforehand. “Don’t. This thing that you are doing – just don’t.”

“You’re afraid.”

“You are still doing it.”

“You’re avoiding her too. She knows you’re hiding, she knows you’re – ”

The Black Shadow of Antiva closed the distance between them in an elegant crouch. He didn’t lay a hand on the boy, but instantly his breath died in his throat. There wasn’t any fear there between them. Zevran would be a fool to imagine it. Thankfully, there was self-preservation.

“Perhaps I wasn’t very clear. _We_ – we are not friends. I do not know you. I do not know your name. What happens when you break into the house of a person who is not a friend, who does not know you at all? Answer me that.”

The boy’s eyes were fixated on him. “They’ll hurt you.”

“_Mm_, yes. It is a show of disrespect. You have disrespected them. This, when you do this – this is also disrespect. Do you understand?”

Slowly, the taut lines of the strange boy softened. He was not completely in rags. He had some armour covering his figure, and Zevran had not missed the knives that he carried, curious parallels to the elf’s own. If he were to read the situation at a glance, he might surmise that this boy had been protecting the two mage girls. Yet, they seemed as terrified of him as they had been of the Templars.

“I led them to the empty house,” the boy spoke hollowly, as though Zevran had recited all of this aloud. “I thought they would be safe, and then I realised that they wouldn’t. Then I heard – _freedom_. Cooped up so long, hungry, needing air – she throws open the doors like a martyr, and you’re afraid that what will meet her are a pyre of swords … ”

A disgusted growl vacated the elf. As he sat back on his haunches, Shimaya darted swiftly into the firelight. Her visage was drawn tight, puckered over with fear, and immediately the boy’s words were like vapour in his ear. “What is it?” he demanded of her. The quiet sisters also peered up from the sparks that blew off the kindling. The Dalish left her quiet disdain for the _shem_, even the _seth’lin_, behind her.

“An army.” Her answer chilled Zevran to the bone.

“It’s good, you know. Seeing her so – _happy_.”

Varric wasn’t the singing and dancing type, though he’d happily join in the drinking until the sun came up. Not as much as in his youth, nor as much as when he’d run with Hawke, but _just_ enough. He gave a sloping grin over toward the Tevinter mage. He’d been a veritable mother hen these past few weeks, and a bigger bridge between the mages and the Inquisition than he probably knew. Currently, his elegantly coiffed head was turned toward the larger bonfire some distance away, watching Fangs tangle with Chuckles. For the first time, Chuckles was laughing and stumbling about like a man in love. It was unmistakeably endearing.

“I’ve barely even seen her _smile_,” the mage continued on. “Not that any of us could blame her, really. How many times does that make it, then, that she’s routinely kicked us out of the fire?”

“You talking the Inquisition, or the world at large? I’m not sure I’m a reliable count for the latter.”

“Just once for the world is already more than most,” Dorian murmured. He turned away from the lovers’ embrace, finally, bending to warm his hands over their comparatively modest fire. The both of them took the time to _watch_. Lady Pentaghast was chuckling helplessly at some story the Lady Montilyet relayed over cups of hot mulled wine. Leliana watched almost wistfully as Sera loosed arrow after arrow into a dummy near fifty feet distant, putting on a show for ruddy-faced Inquisition soldiers. Blackwall and the Iron Bull sat sharing war stories, as only those grizzled and scarred men could do, with the rest of the Chargers chiming in their own accents on memories they all shared. In time, Dorian let loose a long, extravagant sigh. “I’m rather sad I missed the most of it. A late, hardly stylish arrival.”

“Depends on your definition of _stylish_. I’ve heard rumours about what you two got up to. Supposedly that magister guy was going to scrub the herald out of time and existence.”

The mage’s face darkened. “_Hmph._ The rumours are sorely lacking, I assure you.”

“I can imagine. Now’s not the time for that, though. Drink up, Tevinter. You’re _way_ too sober for this.”

Dorian responded with a snicker, moving his mug of wine closer to his lips, though not all the way. “Maybe once we get a better vintage. Is there anyone in charge of it all? A master of wines? No? Well – I’ll throw my hat in for it, then.”

When he saw the dragon spiralling over the mountaintops, Zevran felt the world grow as small as the point of a needle. Of course there was another Blight. Everything made perfect sense – the pregnancy of the air, of something irretrievable on the brink of occurring. The tragedies, the disasters. Though he couldn’t rationally link them all together, he felt at peace in knowing that there had been something, at least, toiling away beneath the ground to build up to a terrible peak. Then came the bravado. _Well_, he thought. _The hero of Ferelden is not here in Haven. The witches of the wild have no doubt gone to vacation in Rivain this time of the year. Here I am._ And there he was – Zevran Arainai, a man who once helped put an end to the Fifth Blight, some ten years ago.

The blunt end of a spear hit him sharply in the back of the ribs. “_That’s a dragon!_” Shimaya hissed into his ear. She spoke as if this was naturally his fault. Perhaps it was. He’d be rather furious too if someone led him away from a cosy home to walk face to face against a dragon.

_Ah._ That had already happened.

“Heart racing, death in your nose. You search the sea of bodies for _her_. _She_ has to live, even if you don’t, even if no-one else – ”

“You,” Zevran cut in without looking. “Take the girls and make yourself sparse.”

“Take them,” Shimaya agreed absently. Blissfully, she’d paid little heed to what the boy had said. Less blissfully, Zevran tore his eyes away from the dragon to face a lesser, somehow more intimidating dragon-in-an-elf’s-body.

“That includes you, my dear. I hear Orlais is enjoying particularly fine weather. Tell your elder to move camp away from Ferelden.”

He entertained, briefly, that she might skewer him on her spear. It would certainly save him the need for planning exactly what he was to do with a dragon and an army, the extent of which he could not tell was human or darkspawn – at least, not from this nightly distance. They crouched on a ridge shrouded in forest, that alone keeping them somewhat invisible. The great beast circling the skies had no interest in scouting supposedly deserted land. Mind you, her scowl was lighting up their particular area.

“Do you think me some useless child, _seth’lin?_ I could slit half those Templars’ throats before ever you made up your mind to draw your blades.”

He was infuriated that she was still thinking of the Templars. Except – _ah_. Of course the Dalish elf would have better sight through a twilit forest. If he squinted just so, he could make out gleaming, rather well-kempt Templar armour. A source of garb he could not recall being in fashion for the darkspawn of the Fifth Blight. The boy of riddles also pushed a hand forward, tugging at the Antivan’s leather-clad shoulder.

“I _know_ how to help. I _can_ help. And so can they.”

Zevran cast a scrutinising eye over the sister mages. He identified with their expressions – determination, and a hunger for survival. That was a fuel that could beat back any army, at least temporarily. And _smartly_. He dug his teeth into the insides of his cheeks, then felt the tension unfurl from the pit of his stomach. _What am I doing?_

“Save it,” Shimaya uttered with some disgust. “You weren’t thinking of taking on an army alone?”

“I would never. I move quicker alone. The Inquisition should be warned, no?”

“Let _me_,” the riddle boy insisted. The light in his eyes was earnest, hard to deny, even as his fingers pinched harder on Zevran’s shoulder. “I know what the Templars have done. I can help them prepare! You – you have too much to lose.”

The Antivan’s glare faltered, just for a moment. He had never liked feeling exposed. Never liked knowing that there was some way others could read his thoughts, the ones he kept draped and hidden away so well. When he relented, even just in demeanour, the boy took it as encouragement. So much so that when he stood, he had vanished from before them. Zevran, who was a shadow but not _that_ much of a shadow, stared confounded at the imprint of the boy’s feet in the earth. He had been there. There was no denying that he had ever been there, if the eye knew just where to look.

“What did he mean?” Shimaya asked. She was scouting the trees, bewildered, but her curiosity drew her glare back to Zevran. When he offered nothing in return, she spat, “Who _are_ you?”

_Heart racing, death in your nose. You search the sea of bodies. She has to live, even if you don’t._

His scent was so close to her, tangling with hers. The fire had a scent too, one the _shem_ often paid no heed to. The splitting, burning wood, the tufts of smoke that coughed up from the embers. It became their scent, twining with _their_ dance. He claimed he did not know how to move, but his grace was that of a wolf’s. This, Niamh thought, was how predators would circle each other to assert dominance. These, their joined hands, was a pact, a union, few could dare to break.

Then, the moment shattered. It was like attuning her ears to a different language, for at first she couldn’t make sense of the words. An Inquisition soldier flew into the rim of firelight that lit the side of Solas’ cheek. She made out the word _dragon_. Then, _attack_. She watched Commander Cullen Rutherford fly to his feet, his drink spilling along the earth.

“Niamh!” someone cried from afar. Then, a hand circled her wrist. “_Herald!_” Cassandra was shaking her back to reality. Solas was retrieving his staff. She stared back into the Nevarran woman’s similarly stricken face, but she did not need to say anything else. It was written in the air. _The time is now. Now, the moment is now._ She turned about, desperate, and found that she stepped right into Solas’ chest. His arm looped her waist. His mouth crashed into hers. An ugly meet of teeth and lip, but she pulled him against her for as long as it could last.

Why? Why did it feel like it wouldn’t last?

“Be with me,” she hissed when they pulled apart. “I need you.”

“_Focus_,” he whispered near to her ear. She held onto the word; pulled it to her. Past the abyss of strangled breath, the one that seemed to draw ever closer to the surface. She was the herald. No. She was _Niamh_. She was Niamh, and she would fight for these people.

She would protect them.

It was not meant to happen like this. He had not meant to revel as they did. He had not meant to weaken his own defences, only too aware that this was not the fairy tale end. He could have warned her. So easily, he could have warned her.

Now, this was the price that pride would pay.

They were still in disarray, a beautiful feast for the army to descend upon and devour. Friend turned upon friend, uncertain in the dim firelight if they were a demon from the Breach, or if this was something else, something more sinister. He watched _her_, her wide and frozen eyes. She was at once living this reality, and yet not. He could not understand it, not fully, but he feared that she too had grown confused as to who she was meant to protect, and who to fight. He began to reach for her, to squeeze feeling back into her fire-painted skin, when the gates of Haven flew inward.

All at once, the din silenced. Where they had expected an army, the head of a monstrous beast, stood a boy. Not even the campfires could breach the shadow that his wide-brimmed hat cast, but it was unmistakeable who he searched for. He saw Niamh when Niamh saw him, and he ran to her, speaking in hushed tones. Unwittingly, Solas realised, he was the bruise from which fear spread. _The Templars_, the Inquisition took up in hushed disbelief. _The Templars have been corrupted._ He saw, then, that a ghost had lit upon Niamh’s face. That she stared into the darkness beyond Haven’s gates and saw an enemy greater, far more terrifying to her than even the Breach had been.

“_Mala suledin nadas_,” he called to her. She twitched, glanced at him over her shoulder. Something had changed about her, he thought, as easily as a wolf might pick up a new scent off of its prey. _Her hand_, he thought absently. _It is not glowing as it once was._

“To the chantry!” the commander called. He had been racing a manic back-and-forth from chantry to front line, his heavy boots carving a thorough path now through the building snow. “We must _fall back!_”

Niamh slid her staff free into the fold of her hands. Smoke the colour of ash seemed to have trailed her from the fire, and yet at once seemed separate – _cold_, Solas thought, to look upon. “We must buy them time,” he heard her say. “The villagers – ”

_The men and women who cannot fight_, he heard her say, even as her phrase faltered. Those within her immediate surrounding understood, including the commander himself. His jaw set, and then he nodded. Rather than give in to chaos, the soldiers began to act methodically. A singular mission had formed in amidst the uncertainty. Solas stepped to the herald’s side. On her other came the shadows of the grey warden, the Tevinter mage, the dwarf crossbowman. Sera, who had moments before displayed her skill on a still target, readied a new arrow for the enemy to come.

Distantly, the dragon roared.

Haven was close enough now that they could hear the panic of the villagers within, but also the heavy, stalwart marching of the enemy without. Zevran had crept into the bedchambers of the highest-ranking nobles. He had fought alongside royalty. He had withstood torture, delivered the very same, and defied a kin of this very same dragon. Despite all of that, he had never been in a war – not in the thick of it. He had never witnessed a village as it saw its doom coursing down the hillside. Heard word of it, distantly and safe in an enclosed camp? Certainly. Saw it come to pass with his very own eyes?

He’d never understood how very fortunate he was.

They watched from a bank of snow and wood stumps eaten through with fungus, the Antivan and his three companions. Shimaya said not a word as the _shem_’s screams battled back against the wind. The two sisters clung to each other, whispering in broken Orlesian, their pale fingers knotted and turned blue from the cold. Zevran watched on until the gates broke – caved inward to fire and blood. Only then did he stand.

“What are you doing?” Shimaya asked. All this time, she had kept the spear planted in the snow, its sharp end pointing up. When Zevran breathed out, his vision was momentarily obscured by a thick fog of silver.

“Do you know who is the first to suffer when a village is overrun?”

Her dark eyes flicked between his, studying him, his intent and his sincerity. Silently, she stood, her fingers pressing hard enough against the shaft of the spear that he thought it might snap. His slender brows rose, but he did not question her. Together, two shadows in the night, they darted for their opening into the village. If the mages followed, he thought, they would follow.

There were more pressing matters, now.

_She must have shown me. Andraste must have shown me so I could tell you._

The chantry’s silence had once been sacred to Leliana. Some were unnerved by it, but she had always thought it a reflection upon their souls – upon the burdens they had yet to unleash unto the embrace of the Maker. Standing in the long hall, facing the deceptively peaceful sight of the closed double doors, she no longer found solace in it. Every moment of quiet now seemed a betrayal. It seemed ominous. It seemed deadly.

“You cannot wait for her here, Leliana.” The commander had, somehow, in all his heavy armour and bluster, snuck up behind her. She flinched, but did not turn. In his dying breath, Chancellor Roderick had revealed that there was a path through the mountains, hidden, that they could take to flee from Haven. No – not _flee_. To protect. To save those who could not save themselves. The Dalish girl, the same one who would have cursed them all for _shem_, did not hesitate to take to the winter cold once more – her last sacrifice to the world.

_The Elder One doesn’t care about the village_, the boy with the large hat had said. _He only wants the Herald._ Niamh’s visage had been as cold and still as a statue of Andraste. Leliana had seen the death in her eyes before ever she’d said a word.

“Someone has to,” she whispered. Before they had departed, the apostate Solas had grasped for the herald’s hand. Such a simple thing, love. So powerful, even in the throes of decay. Cullen reached for her, but she turned before he could impart his touch. She had no doubt her expression was bitter. No doubt _venomous_. He took an uncertain step backwards. “All the lengths we would go to deny to ourselves that she was Andraste’s chosen. Who else would give so much as she has done? Who else would shelter the mages, sacrifice her body for them in the same breath?”

The commander had no answer for her. In fact, he looked ashamed – chastened. He would have been the last to embrace a Dalish mage as the herald of his faith. Leliana wondered if she was any better.

“They need us,” he whispered. “She has made her choice, and now we must hold up our end.”

_Andraste must have shown me so I could tell you._

The silence broke on a guttural scream.

It was Dorian who pulled Solas away. The details were infuriatingly indistinct, blurring beneath the snow, but that much he could recall. He saw Niamh framed against the last standing trebuchet, her arm held up in the grasp of a twisted, malformed entity that would put the Iron Bull to shame in his height. From the mark of her hand did not come that familiar aura of the Fade that he knew so well. He had begun to notice the erratic nature of her magic during the battle proper – how the shadows danced by her ankles. How twisted faces rose from the bodies she left curled against the ice. From between her fingers now billowed a dark bank of cloud like a storm. Soon, she and the Elder One both were engulfed within it, and Solas could see no more.

It was his fault, he already knew. _Pride._ She had singled out his name from the moment that they met, and seen through him as easily as if he were a bride’s veil. He could still count the freckles on her cheeks, across her nose, from memory. Could still recall the heat of her body as they danced so closely together, drinking in the light of the bonfire.

He could not leave her. For more than she knew, he could not leave her.

The familiar groan of the trebuchet cut through the thick fog. They watched together, the two mages, Varric up to his thighs in snow just some distance away. They watched the shape of the large projectile arc through the air, spinning into maddening invisibility. Then, above it all, they heard the roar of a mountainside beginning its slide.

“_We can’t just stand here!_” the dwarf bellowed to them. “_We’ve got to go!_”

_Ir abelas, da fen._

Before he had finished the thought, her scream sang harmony with the fall of the avalanche. Where the avalanche strengthened, however, her wail fell away, dragged beneath the ground. Buried, into that place where all his ghosts and regrets resided.

_Ar lasa mala revas._


	15. XV.

“_She shook the radiance of the stars, divided them into grains of light, then stored them in a shaft of gold. Andruil, blood and force, save us from the time this weapon is thrown. Your people pray to You. Spare us the moment we become Your sacrifice._”

\- Veilfire from the Temple of Mythal

Death was cold. Death was breathing in snowflakes, filling up the lungs with an ice so slick it sat like steel at the base of her stomach. Death was feeling the snow weigh upon her like a herd of wild horses, her eyes glazed as she stared into velvet blackness, certain that her own sight had been robbed from her.

_What else?_ a voice whispered to her from somewhere unseen. _What else will be taken from you, da’len?_

Death was watching a sudden sputter and spark of emerald. Death was the palm of her hand illuminating the high arch of a wintry cavern, its walls glittering like an accompaniment of stars that watched her in her eternal rest. She thought that it was beautiful, and then she thought that the dead do not revel in the beauty of the living. They are meant to be gone, empty, a hollow arm slung over a child’s chest to bathe her in the smell of the passing. To hide her from the cruelty of scavengers.

Niamh took a wretched, writhing gasp into her lungs.

_The anchor. I still have it._ She forced herself onto her side, gritting her teeth against the cold that seemed to crystallise inside of her with every breath. _He tried to take it from me, but he couldn’t._ Niamh could still see the twisted abomination of his face, unfocused between layers of discomfort, but shrouding her like the cobwebs of a lingering nightmare. No – worse than a nightmare. Nightmares could be left behind. Nightmares couldn’t tear the world asunder.

_The Elder One._ That was what the boy had called him. That was what the creature had called himself. _The anchor._ That was what the Elder One had named the mark upon her hand. Had it saved her? It glimmered again beneath the curl of her fingertips like an emerald set aglow. _No_, she reminded herself. She had reached the trebuchet – loosed its weight toward the side of the mountain so that the snow would come to bury the village.

_This is my tomb._ Her breath frosted before her nose. The temptation to simply close her eyes, embrace the rest finally given unto her, was sickly sweet. _Mala suledin nadas._ Solas’ words returned to her. He had been there, hadn’t he? Warm, with the scent of the bonfire curling into his garb. She breathed in again, slowly. Then, she sat.

The cavern was not a tomb. Not fully. Tunnels led off from this atrium into which she had descended. Looking up, she could see how the landslide had broken in through the ceiling, spilling out like a ghostly veil upon which she had been curled. She worked to pull her arms and her legs free from the chilling blanket, disconcerted to find that she could not feel from her forearms or her calves. When she attempted to rub sensation back into them, she found her fingers seemed to belong to someone else.

_Pick a tunnel_, she thought dully. _Any tunnel._ Several attempts were made to find her feet, but in the end she crawled and pushed herself across the ice, coercing herself to dismiss the snail’s pace. As long as she was moving, that was all that mattered. Her elbow rested on something long, slender, and firm. _My staff_, she mused. With its aid, she pulled herself halfway up, continuing along in an inelegant crouch. Sometimes, she would find herself resting for overlong, caught between wakefulness and the embrace of sleep. If she closed her eyes, she knew, it would not just be her dreams that swallowed her.

So she kept on.

She became vaguely aware that she was not alone. Phantoms passed near to her, translucent against the shimmering walls of this underground cave system she had found herself in. Some of them looked familiar to her, like the wisp of a mother’s face from the side. The back of her father’s shoulder as she watched from a toddler’s height. Leliana passed an inch away, her features worn down from years of torture and bitter resentment. A wolf padded softly before her, waiting at the end of each labyrinthine turn. Sometimes, when the ice was clear enough, she could look down and see her own face, and looking over her flustered braid were the faces of _elvhen_ she did not know. Faces of _shem_ who seemed at once repentant in grief.

The tunnel she had followed began to slope up. The wolf was more urgent in his guidance now, and he would sit on his haunches every so often to watch her, three blinking eyes upon the sides of his head. “_Fen’Harel ma ghilana_,” she rasped with a soft snicker, but the wolf did not react aside from being patient. Soon, a star blossomed behind him, through him, and it seemed like hours before Niamh realised that it was light. _Natural_ light. Her knees touched a fresh bank of snow, and the sky opened up above her head. Clutching onto her staff with both hands, she rose slowly to her feet. When she looked about her, the wolf was gone.

“Must I go?” she asked the flurry of snow that settled onto her face. The sky did not answer. The earth did not answer. The cave behind her, though it seemed to breathe with its own living, beating heart, remained reticent. “Haven’t I done enough? _Halam’shivanas_ – I gave it to you. I did.”

Nothing. No-one answered. The tears started down her cheeks, but froze as soon as they touched the air. The sobs, too, stuck to the back of her throat. She forced herself forward, step by step, though she dreaded each one. She dreaded how her knees would sink into the snow; how with each thrust forward she sunk further and further in. “I can’t,” she whispered. “No more. This is enough. I’ve had enough. _Enough_.”

And with each word, she stepped forward, and then forward. Again, and again, and again.

_Heart racing. Sea of bodies. She has to live._

_ She has to live._

There was snow in his mouth, snow in his hair, snow weighing down the hood that trickled icing water down his back and under his leathers. When he breathed, he breathed snow. When he moved, he moved through snow. Some time ago, all his thoughts had muddled down to purely the sensation of cold. That, and the riddle the strange boy had posed to him what seemed like so long ago. Over and over, he clung to that. And if he felt the cold, well – at least he was still _alive_.

A small procession followed him now. An apothecary, a merchant, an innkeeper, a quartermaster. A Dalish elf and two sister mages, their heads bowed against the blizzard. They had done all they could, between them, to save these wayward villagers from the devouring fire and destruction wantonly delivered by the Templars. The innkeeper had been trapped inside of her own tavern, screaming to be let out as smoke billowed through the crushed door. Zevran was not particularly strong. If he breathed in fire, he was as likely to sputter and fold in half as any other. Yet, somehow, he had persevered – and when he thought he could not, Shimaya would throw herself into the fray, grasping for desperate _shem_ hands.

Now, the two mages lit the back of the line with fire tingling their fingertips. It did little to provide warmth, but perhaps it was good enough for morale. Zevran had taken note of quickly erected and abandoned campfires. Tracks similar to their own of a large group moving through the great white drifts. If they kept going, kept following, eventually they would be free of this mountain pass.

It was the determination to carry on, he thought, that was the greatest obstacle. The urge to stop, to light their own fire and never rise up again, was heady and unspoken between them all. In some way, this was a funeral procession. _It could be_, he thought to himself. _This could be for nothing, in the end._

In the distance, he spotted the silhouette of a wolf. He knew it in his chest, immediately, even though he was an elf of the city, and one did not spend their time there eyeing up the streets for predator beasts. He held up an arm to signal to the others behind him, while well aware the wolf would see him do the same. Shimaya drew up, her advance preceded by her gushing, unfurling breath. They watched the wolf together, uncertain of what to do next, begrudging of sparing their precious breath for words. Slowly, the beast turned as though to walk away. Then it looked back, waiting for them to follow.

_Impossible_, Zevran thought. _It is only a wolf._

“Look there,” the innkeeper, her name Flissa, called. “I think he wants us to follow him.”

The two elves exchanged a glance. Then, Zevran shrugged. “Being devoured by a wolf is far more exciting than freezing to death,” he said, or tried to, for his teeth shivered as much as the rest of his body. He thought he saw Shimaya’s eyes roll up skyward, but by then, they were both moving in tandem to meet the beast.

Seeing that they had taken note, the wolf continued to trot before them. He was never close enough to be a distinct shape, for that which Zevran was moderately grateful, as that seemed to imply that he was not interested in feasting upon their bones. Besides, it provided another distraction aside from the mantra in his head. Something to narrow his focus on besides the biting chill. Shimaya continued to keep him company, though they never looked at one another. He thought that they did not need to.

In time, they crested another hill, and he saw the pass begin to narrow, grow brighter. _Firelight_, he thought, though it was only the perspective of standing upon a great mound that made it seem so close. It was something, no matter how far away. It was hope. The wolf, however, seemed to have made itself sparse. _Better, in the end, regardless of my jests._ He let out a deep exhale and took his first step downward, back into the thickness of the snow.

He stepped on something long and slender and firm, giving him pause. At first, he thought that it was a root or a fallen branch. Then, as he began to clear the snow with his foot, to look down, he spotted an arm, the hand of it holding onto a staff. His heart leapt up into the base of his throat. “_Shimaya_,” he rasped, and they knelt together over this prone form, digging desperately to free the stranger from the ice which had gradually built itself up like a pyre. His fingertips scraped over a freckled cheek, brushed over the bridge of a nose – half-open, fluttering eyes. The Dalish beside him gasped, a wretched, raw sound. Zevran, in turn, would have known that face anywhere. At a diamantine party, him in a mask, watching from the safety of a balcony. Her, her pale eyes, steeling through him like a sword.

_She has to live._

He pulled her to him, pulled his cloak around her, hoping that what little warmth remained in him would transfer to her. He hooked a slender arm beneath her knees, cradled her head to his chest. When Shimaya saw the determined look to him, her tan brow furrowed, then she swallowed and helped him rise to his feet, him staggering and adjusting the added weight of another life to his own. This was not very usual for him, _saving_ lives.

“That’s her!” the apothecary barked over his shoulder. “That’s the herald!”

“And there,” Zevran breathed, “are her people.”

From the valley of fire came the shapes of Inquisition soldiers, torches branded in their hands, their voices pitching up and filling the terrain with life and sound. He glanced downward, afraid that in the space of all of this, the great distance between them, the life of the Herald of Andraste would slip out of reach even as he held her to him. Their eyes met, the tips of her lashes turned silver with frost. Her lips moved, grating on a whisper.

“You are forgiven,” she whispered, to him and yet not to him, and the three words cut into the mantra that had been held in pause within his mind, tying into the song.

_Heart racing, death in your nose. Despair not; you are forgiven._


	16. XVI.

“_How does one pin down a dream? How can one control a thought so that it might travel always the same course from conception to completion?_”

\- Magister Callistus of Taraevyn

She was like a wraith covered in spider’s silk when they brought her into camp. Solas stepped eagerly, then grew self-conscious and tempered himself, shrouding himself out of the firelight as the survivors crowded around their saviour. Gone was the prejudice that he had seen from them, once, that a girl of a Dalish clan should claim to represent Andraste. She was a torch of hope, even though her breath was shallow, her skin near tinged blue. They wrapped her in the cloak of the elf who carried her, set her by the fire – and then the very same elf knelt by her like a guardian, in a manner that Solas suddenly envied, wishing that he too could be so free and brazen.

He knew it was infantile of him. He resented that she had become a myth to them, a hero. He resented that, before all of this, they would not have cast her a second glance. He resented that he had kept more to himself than should have been wise, and yet simultaneously given more than he had any right to. He had lied to her, directly, when she had questioned him on the point of the Conclave. He had been a coward.

But _they_ – they were not cowards.

A Revered Mother of the Chantry joined Niamh’s prone figure by the fire. Her watcher looked up, his face softening. From where Solas stood, he could make out interesting markings on the man’s left cheek. Not _vallaslin_ – far from it. It held no significant meaning, and that again infuriated him. He reminded himself, quietly, that the only one responsible for his frustration was himself.

Then, as though Solas’ gaze upon him was like the point of a dagger pressing persistently against those very same markings, the watcher looked from the Revered Mother to him. There was intelligence in his brown eyes, and for the first time in so long, Solas felt that he had suddenly been exposed, laid naked – not in such a way as passion or lust or the burning touch of another could instil, but in the way that the wintry cold gnawed and pawed at his thin, all too wanting garb. Worst of all, he thought, there was _recognition_. And there was no reason for this elf with whom he shared very little, this elf of whom he had no recollection, to gaze at him with such an intense understanding of who he was. The spider’s silk of Niamh’s shroud had extended into threads – those threads iced over into crystal, that crystal cocooning this valley, marking it all too silent. Not a whisper of air shifted the yellow hair which crept across the watcher’s brown cheek. Not a murmur of mist escaped the soft parting of his lips.

All too fitting, then, that the sudden silence could be pierced, ruptured, so effortlessly by the shedding of a mask. The red woman, the Left Hand of the Divine, flew across the terrain of trodden snow, flew into the circle of firelight until she gracelessly remembered herself. Her cheeks flushed from cold, from the tension of hushed bickering amongst her peers, and now from the heat of, again, _recognition_ … and shame. The watcher tore his eyes from Solas. Indeed, all memory of their brief connection seemed to flee him. Everything, so suddenly, seemed to pale to the stark vibrancy of colour these two shared in their proximity to one another.

Then, the Left Hand of the Divine did what Solas had not seen her do, once, in all her tenure as this Inquisition’s elongated shadow. She knelt to a knee.

Then, she did more. She began to weep and laugh at the same time.

Curiouser, the watcher himself began to laugh. They laughed and laughed, the former hiding her lips within the cusp of her hand, the latter tilting his head so that a snowflake here and there would drizzle his brow. The Revered Mother appeared most chiding, but perhaps she too sensed that there was more between them that she could not understand, that could only be vented through the passage of mirth and grief. Then, to mark a finish, the woman extended a hand to the elf, and after a moment’s pause, the elf met her cold, pale fingertips with the warm, weathered grasp of his own.

“Thank you, Zevran,” Leliana spoke. She did not intend to speak loudly, but the curious quiet that resided in this valley bore her no favour. The one named Zevran made no pretence that others did not listen. Indeed, he seemed to give not a care in the world that the world may eavesdrop. He smiled in a way that roused the lines of mirth and age and life around his eyes, and he squeezed her hand both familiar and affectionate, secrets pressed between their fingertips.

But, much as their exchange seemed to break the harsh spell upon the valley, so too did it pierce the fever of the Herald who lay swaddled between them. That their hands united over her fluttering chest seemed false symbolism, and yet Solas found – again – that he was jealous of it. Jealous of the tapestry they wove. Jealous that he could not lower his own hand over Niamh’s breast and stoke warmth, reprieve, back into her wearied bones. So, instead, he watched as Zevran’s dark hand lay to rest upon her collarbone, flicking away frosted hair that rested undone from her braid. When her eyes fluttered open, his was the first face that she saw. Nor was Solas privy to the unveiling of her waking moments. The scattered residents of Haven, the foot soldiers of the Inquisition, her own left hand – all watched on as air unfurled from her chapped lips in the silver smoke of life. And, as though the world around had waited too on bated breath, the wind began once more to whistle through the valley. Hair and hearts were stirred, scattered cups brought together in mumbled utterances of celebration. Zevran and Leliana both helped Niamh to sit, and she looked past him, _through_ him, lost in an abyss that rested far below what skin could be touched.

It was then that the Revered Mother began to hum. Softly, so softly, that the unquiet of the valley once more swallowed whole that which would have reverberated sharply seconds beforehand. Noting this, she raised her voice. A song – not a drinking song, Solas considered, but a religious one. _The dawn will come_, she uttered with surety, as though the rising of the Dalish girl was the very sun peering over the valley’s mountainous walls. Hope bled into Leliana’s visage, and then she too joined. It was infectious. To her belonged the voice of a nightingale, and there is nothing that encourages fellows to sing more than the blossoming of beauty.

“_The night is long_,” this collection of brogues and hums and birdsong chanted, “_and the path is dark; look to the sky, for one day soon, the dawn will come._” To Solas’ heart, it appeared child’s play. It appeared almost insulting, affronting, that they would make music out of the devastation of the Dalish girl. Then, he wondered if he had done the same. If he had taken the devastation of her life, a purpose forged far beyond her agency, and turned it to a song that took more from her than it gave.

Soon, the valley was in uproar. Firelight flickered high, the icy wind tossed and turned the embers. There were only three, it seemed, who did not partake in the song. The Dalish girl, her watching lover, and the one called Zevran. The one who saw things with too much clarity, and whose arm had now come to rest around Niamh’s shoulders in choking familiarity. Not choking her, Solas realised, but choking _him_. Jealousy, jealousy – that dreadful, mortal thing. A thing that does not befit a man of pride, nor a man named after that same vice.

Jealousy and pride. Were they more alike than he had ever cared to think?

And their eyes met again, the triad of them. It seemed in that moment, in the song of the _shemlen_, that they had all come to recognise the other. That there was jealousy, and pride, and there was more – and when Solas tasted the _more_, he found that it burned him. Even in the winter’s harsh grasp, even in the relief he felt in Niamh’s wakening –

– it _burned_.


	17. XVII.

_“‘Play with us,’ said Dirthamen._

_‘Alas,’ spoke the deer, ‘I cannot. I am old, and although I wish to go to my rest, my legs can no longer carry me.’”_

\- Gisharel, Keeper of the Ralaferin clan, from _The Story of Falon’Din and Dirthamen_

Skyhold bore all the privacy of a house without walls. A whisper could echo off the stone like a dozen children followed at Leliana’s footsteps, giggling in repetition. The ceilings, for all their height, afforded so much space for overlooking balconies – eyes that peered from above as well as from below. The shadows, though elegant and mysterious in the wake of skewed candlelight, were too full of dust and grit to house a silhouette without an accompaniment of coughs and scratches. No – great, ancient, and perhaps somewhat _magical_ though it was, the fortress lay lacking in every attribute befitting a spymaster of the Inquisition.

It was much to her amusement, then, that Zevran still found some sequestered corner for their _rendezvous_ – a wing of the fortress that was more cobweb and covered furnishings than the ripe life and refurbishment that she had grown used to eavesdropping on. Somewhere near the kitchens, he had written in his lopsided handwriting. Quiet corridors, damp walls. Not so romantic, he had apologised, but fitting to the task, and – he was sure – she would appreciate the thought behind it.

She had worried he had changed, but perhaps she should have worried he had not changed at all.

The image of him that she carried in her mind’s eye shifted only a little as he came into view, framing himself in some vacant window sill, tucking a knee to his chest as he carelessly gazed out over the yard below. To his credit, she thought, he had managed not to flirt with every passing heartbeat. He had managed to keep himself low and presentable, and he had managed, somehow, not to have so many questions asked of him – even though he himself had rescued the Herald from a snowy death. Even though, supposedly, he had rescued many more from the wreck of Haven.

Saving lives, rather than taking them. _Silly_, Leliana chided herself. _We are all capable of change._ She cleared her throat and, as she could have predicted, he acted for all the world as though he’d seen her coming from the other side of the hold. It took several moments for him to look up, an easy smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Ah, _cariña_ – stunning, as ever.”

He was already standing from his perch, looking to swoop her off her feet, no doubt. Leliana gracefully stepped backwards, one slender brow arching. Privacy should shed all pretence, and she had, in reflection, grown used to thinking of his demeanour as a pretence. The flirting, the inappropriate comments – she had seen the heart of him. The _true_ heart. How he behaved when he thought that he would not live to see another day. So, perhaps unkindly, she chose her words with purpose.

“It seems old friends come together more and more frequently. Only so long ago I met with Alistair and his queen. It seems an eternity has passed since our adventures, no?”

Zevran Arainai stopped in his tracks. The brief swagger, the injection of pretence, melted off of him like wax from a wick. It was then that Leliana saw his age – the lines it had whittled into a face so handsome. The eyes … the eyes spoke the most. His eyes brought her a great sadness.

“_Ah_,” he answered with less gusto, and his arms swung nonchalantly back to his sides. “Was it so long ago? I still shake the darkspawn loose from my boots.”

“So sure they aren’t the corpses you’ve left behind? With many tales to go along with them. Your reputation precedes you.”

He looked away, and she pondered what conversation he had pictured for this. Surely not simple banter. Surely he did not think her so naïve. He wandered back to the window, and she found that he had been watching the stable be cleaned out; the passage of beasts back and forth from the green of the yard to the sanctum of its walls. It was a strange sight, after the many days voyaging through a snowy pass. Leliana remembered he was not very fond of the cold, either.

“The corpses I have left behind, I would not keep in my boots. This is a strange place, do you know?” He looked back over his shoulder, his own brow cocked. “There are whispers in the walls. Paintings upon them. That elf, the bald one – he colours your tale on the stone as if there will be eyes to remember it.”

“Do you think our story so inconsequential?”

He shrugged, and he smiled without humour. “I have watched a queen made. Many stories will pale in its wake.”

“Zevran – ”

“You have not lost your sharpness, Leliana. I am proud.”

She had not expected pride from him, nor had she ever sought it. To go seeking Zevran Arainai’s approval at the peak of his youth would have been a foolish thing indeed. Now, up close, he had lost that youth she had grown to associate with him. The lines, yes, but the way he carried himself too. He tried to act the careless one, but she could see the amount of care he weighed upon his shoulders. The bane of any professional assassin. She released her guard and strode to him, posturing by the window herself, that her pale eyes might also measure the beasts of burden. A faint smile twitched at her lips.

“Some blades may fall into uselessness through age, but others have the stone walls around them to thank for their sharpness. We are our own prisoners, you and I. Though we walk different paths … have we not always been the same, Zevran?”

He studied her curiously, and she could not read his visage. She pondered that she had never quite been able to. If anyone had come close to truly knowing him, perhaps it was that queen they had together made. Though, perhaps, none other had made her but herself.

“This is not a sentiment you have expressed so clearly before. But … yes. Perhaps there are similarities.” The elf paused. “Though it has been many long years, Leliana. Some few letters.”

“Oh, it was _you_ who stopped writing first! And, _ah_ – those letters were so _short_.” She stifled a giggle. “You were never one for the written word, though the spoken – _oh_, you could never be quiet.”

“How could I? Our adventures merited _many_ comments.”

“_Lewd_ ones?”

“Most certainly.”

A full laugh pressed against her teeth, coming out in an ungainly snort. “You – oh, I never could tell when to take you seriously.”

They stood like this for a time, until the horses had found their shelter in their stables, and in their place came a regiment of Inquisition soldiers testing their bruised mettle. It was a companionable silence, both comfortable yet not, for Leliana found that she felt vulnerable to be around someone so near to her past – so capable of putting her at ease. Zevran himself remained still and content as some forgotten statue of the fortress, standing for all the world as though he had always belonged there.

“Why?” she asked at last. The bluntness of the question after their camaraderie still did not stir him.

“Why?” he repeated.

“Why come here? Why save her?”

“Why would I not? Is she not the _Herald of Andraste?_”

“You were never pious.”

“No,” he conceded. A glimmer of the daylight caught his eye as he canted his head. “But I _am_ an assassin, you mean to say.”

“It would be ludicrous of me to judge you for it.”

“Ludicrous, and out of touch. I no longer consider myself a Crow.”

She weighed him, again, searching for the truth in his honeyed words. A mounting bud of frustration crested her brow. He was, still, unreadable.

“I know that you murder them.”

“That is not cooperation, _mi querida_.”

“No. But when their leaders are perished, their numbers so dwindled, would they not concede to their pupil?”

There, the slightest break to his visage. “You think I command them, now?”

“Maybe. I am out of touch. I have not heard from you for … for far too long. Who am I to say what you have become? Which whispers of your deeds am I to trust? You would wonder the same, would you not? You already do.” She gestured a pale hand out toward the yard, cutting a crescent silhouette against the lingering daylight. “You do not recognise – _this_. You do not recognise the woman who stands before you.”

“_Ah_. You think me the fool.”

“Hardly – ”

He lifted a lazy hand, brushing away the symptoms of an insult taken with brief assurance. “I was a fool, all those years ago. A resigned one. One without purpose. That is the man you recall, no? That is who you recognise. One who finds his greatest achievements through following orders. An _assassin_.”

“I assume you’ve changed.”

“We all change, my dear. We all share that virtue.” He shrugged. “I would like to think that I know my purpose, now. That those orders I follow are my own, from the heart.”

“A romantic thought.”

“An Orlesian would know. No, I am not some assassin hired to kill your herald. That is not why I am here, nor is it why I might have misguidedly saved her life. _Purpose, mi querida_. Purpose is powerful; intoxicating.”

“The wrong purpose can be a poison, would you not agree?”

“I see I cannot convince you.”

“I too have learned many things, Zevran. Blind trust is a dagger between close friends.”

“Then allow me to consider _your_ purpose?”

She braced herself, for a joke or for flirtation. For that easy smile to return to his lips, that he might banter away the pointed end of an interrogation. He curved his body to her, one elbow pressed against the window’s perch, and he spoke mercilessly and nonchalantly.

“You did not meet me here to label me _assassin_, nor to accuse. You met me here because you know already I have no intentions to kill her. You yearn for connections, Leliana. You yearn for me to tell you that the Crows are in the palm of my hand. That when I give you my hand, they will be in the palm of yours. You crave power, my dear. Power that I do not have, nor have any interest in giving. You overestimate me, as much as you give me no credit. I have nothing for you, spymistress.”

It was not a slap. Zevran was not one to deal in slaps. Rather it was a sharp tap on her wrist; a _tsk_ from betwixt smiling lips. Leliana had moved past being stung unnecessarily, but when sharp words came from such a close ally, formerly or not, there was a hissing burn beneath her skin. He bandaged it with his usual cordial smile. He had never really _smirked_. Not since he had left his life in the hands of the now queen of Ferelden.

“I see,” she spoke finally. “_That_ is what you think of me.”

“Is that not what you think of me?”

Of course. An insult for an insult. Or was it only banter, between friends? So long ago now … she could hardly tell the difference.

“My question still stands. Why save her?”

There was a flicker in his gaze, briefly unguarded. Something soft. Something familiar.

_Of course_, Leliana thought. _Purpose._

_ But a herald is no queen, old friend._

She felt the sunlight first, coursing over her skin like the touch of a warm spring, a river roiling and hissing in the soft beginnings of summer. Because of this, she dreamt of summer where only winter surrounded her. The dust motes became dapples of unfocused light. In each shimmering orb, she could imagine a face. Figures in garb she could not recognise. Figures of myriad backgrounds. They passed to and fro across the foot of her bed, casting shadows, though the shadows were never enough to bring her back to a chill.

At first, she waited in her dreams. She waited for someone familiar to come to find her, to take her on journeys untouched by her waking moments. Those boundaries between life and dream had become so thin in recent days … she waited, like waiting for a pitcher of water to materialise beside her. She waited until she thirsted too greatly, and then she dreamt of the springs again. The rivers of her childhood.

A wolf watched her on the opposite bank. A crow sang in the lush tree branches above. Her head bobbed from one between the other, her hair soaked to its tips.

Niamh woke. There was perspiration on her cheeks, and she was both warm and cold. She recoiled from the sunlight, then at second thought rolled back into its glowing glance. Shadows of framework across glass painted itself on one leg that had kicked free of her clinging blanket. If she moved her head just enough, her slender throat straining with the effort, she could make out how tall those windows were – how grand; how beautiful. The bed was so soft, too. Softer even than the one she had known in Haven. That was her first begrudging thought – that the _shem_ knew how to make good beds.

Then, cold filled the hollow of her chest. A cold, deep loneliness. A lone trek through a frozen pass, not knowing whether she would find life again. If she would find anyone at all. She attempted to sit, but she was too weak. It would be easier just to close her eyes, but then she was afraid she would be alone there too. That the one she desired to see most would leave her there, unattended. Forgotten.

Niamh closed her eyes. Her lids were so heavy, she could not fight them.

She woke again, and the sunlight came in at a different angle, painting the floorboards a deep rich gold. This time, she embraced her solitude. She gazed up at a dark, stone ceiling, high and domed, and she played a game of imagining animal shapes in the crevices. Wolf, crow, wolf, crow. She played that game until her eyes closed again, and she willed herself not to dread the loneliness.

She slept, she woke, she slept, she woke again. Existence became a blurred, uncertain thing. Not one of particular enjoyment, nor one of particular agony. Oddly, she was … content. She learned something new about the chamber each time her lids fluttered open. It was not her home, it would never be home, but there was a melancholy to it that touched beneath her ribcage. She respected it like she had respected her elders before her. She respected the phantoms that wandered from wall to wall, oblivious that their lives had long passed.

Once, when she woke, an old and familiar face hung over her own. Dark hair framed tan features, sharp eyes scrutinising her from beneath Mythal’s _vallaslin_. Niamh imagined it was a dream as anything else had been a dream, and this was not the figure she had long awaited. When she moved to close her eyes again, however, a rough hand closed around her own – surprisingly cool to the touch. Refreshingly so.

“_Lasa ghilan_,” Shimaya whispered. There was such an earnest light to her, one that Niamh could not remember seeing. Always, they had been snide with one another. She had been the wretched Dread Wolf’s pup – Shimaya a talented huntress, the pinnacle of Dalish pride. Yet, she found that her fingers twitched around her old adversary’s. Squeezed life and reassurance where she felt so little of it within her own heart. The Mythal-marked girl stirred. She even smiled.

Afterwards, the dream of the old rivers, the warm springs – they became sweeter. Rather than wait for a stranger yet to come, Niamh found that she looked upon her old life almost jealously. There had been something trustworthy about her solitude then, even if it had soured upon her young and impatient tongue. There had been peace and, as she now knew, peace was invaluable.

Her fever broke, finally.

A bowl of watery soup had been shifted, atop a crate and all, to the side of her bed. Shimaya dozed with her back against the bed’s frame, head slumped over her chest. Niamh sat up, finally, to admire the chamber at large. Its open space, and the wintry yet still cosy breeze that drifted through the cracks in the glass. She breathed in fresh air for what she felt was the first time in so long, and for that brief instance, she was very glad indeed to be alive and well. She touched her feet to the floorboards, tested their dusty sheen, felt them creak beneath her weight.

Where was she? This wasn’t Haven, was it?

She hovered by Shimaya, pondering if she should wake her. It had been so long, yet she seemed no different. As though Niamh had left the clan only yesterday. She reached out, then thought better of it. Solitude was peace, after all. She tested the mettle of the room first, walking its paces lengthwise, over and over. Every so often, she would hear the clamour of life from beyond those tall, weathered windows. Finally, she went to greet the din, pressing her freckled face near to the glass, enough that her breath fogged it and smeared her vision. In time, however, she could make out the people. So many of them, and many of them familiar. _Survivors_. The word came instinctively to her. They were survivors, all.

They had made it. _Yes_. Haven had been attacked. Yes.

Fire, and ice, and her breath slowly suffocating. _Yes._

But this was not the snowy pass that she remembered losing consciousness in. She had been found, somehow – or perhaps she hadn’t been. Perhaps Falon’Din had taken her to the Beyond, and this was its shape, its hue, though she could not fully comprehend it. Niamh stepped back from the glass, disturbed by the thought.

A creak sounded from behind her. Recently fever-stricken though she was, frail in body, she spun around with sharpened reflex, her hands forming fists. She struck out in a panic and he caught her wrist, two brown fingers lightly yet firmly enclosing around her sickly flesh. The breath caught in her throat, tangled there as if by net. He was close, _too_ close, and she recognised him. He recognised her.

“Have care,” the crow chided her. He was warm, too warm. The corner of his mouth moved too easily up in a smile. Without a mask to subdue his features, he seemed harmless. Not very noteworthy at all. Not very dangerous – and for that fact alone, he _was_ dangerous. Niamh flinched and stepped backward. She tugged her wrist free, but he had not been holding on very tightly. He let her go without resistance. “I heard such busy pacing, I thought she had woken. She is a very cross woman, by nature.”

The herald glanced at the sleeping Dalish. She must have been exhausted indeed, to not wake yet. As though reading her thoughts (too, _too_ easy), the crow mused, “She has scarce left your side. Or slept, for that matter.”

“Why?”

“Why? _Ay,_ a common question in these parts. Why not?”

“One should sleep when they are weary.”

He smiled again, though the gesture seemed exasperated. “You could cure the ills of the world with such bluntness. Though, perhaps you already have?” The crow paused. “Niamh, yes? That is your name?”

“The crow has ears.”

“_Ah._ So does the little wolf.”

Briefly, her eyes widened. It was curious. No-one besides her clan had referred to her as such, truly. Varric called her _Fangs_, but that could be attributed to any number of prickly beasts in the forest. She shifted uncomfortably where she stood, and he watched her through it all.

“What is _your_ name?” Accusatory, flat. Her voice rasped, un-watered for so long. The crow gestured toward the grey soup.

“Zevran. I brought the soup, though I cannot claim its craft. Truthfully, it is not very appetising. It lacks, _eh_ – a certain spice. But it will do you good to wet your tongue.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Zevran cocked his head, and his smile became almost a mocking grin. “I find that hard to believe.”

It was not long before he had coaxed her into emptying the bowl of its soup, and after draping the blanket over the sleeping Shimaya’s shoulders, he guided her to the fortress’ kitchens, though it was a very long way. Niamh deduced he attempted to keep her out of sight, and for that, she was at least partly grateful. There, he procured her a heel of bread and a slice of cheese, and they played that game for a time – he would bring her some fare, she would tell him she had had her fill, and he would eye her critically before bringing her more. Always, she ate.

“Where are we?” she asked him at last. He sat on one of the barrels of fish and looked around as though the answer would be writ on the walls. It was not.

“The elf called it _Skyhold_. Supposedly it has lain unoccupied for … well, some length of time. I am no historian.”

“The elf?”

“Solas, was it? He paints murals on the wall. He worries for you.”

The name stirred a deep ache within her. _Solas_. Where had he been? Why did he not visit her in her dreams?

Had she disappointed him, somehow?

“He brought us here?” She asked this as she nibbled upon the rind of her cheese, at once creamy and firm, a peculiar luxury after so long taken by a fever. Zevran smiled and offered her a little wooden pot.

“Try it with the honey. It will be kinder to your palate. And he brought us here, yes – most strangely as though he had misplaced an entire fortress and the fact had slipped his mind. Still, we were cold and desperate, and this is a fine shelter.”

“He is well travelled,” she argued, though her stomach churned strangely as she said it. “He knows of things that others do not.”

“Of this I have no doubt. But then, I know very little.” He showed her how to spread the honey on the heel of bread, then drape the cheese across its golden mattress. The flavours spoiled her tongue, and she felt a faint blush of pleasure creep up her cheeks. If he saw this, he did not comment. “Has he told you of the place before?”

“No. I’ve never heard of a Skyhold.”

“I see. Then he does not tell you everything at all, as I have been led to believe.”

“Who told you that?”

“The red-haired dwarf.”

“Of course,” she mumbled between cheese and honey and bread. This time, her blush was of humiliation, though she could not say why. She had not cared before if others commented on her entanglement with Solas. It was the fever, she decided, and nothing more than that. “He tells me enough.”

“Still, this seems a sizeable secret to keep to oneself. But … _ah_, the mountains house many strange things.” A distant look touched his brown eyes, and then they lapsed into silence. Niamh would not call it companionable, but she was infuriated to discover that she was not uneasy with him. There were many questions, in turn, that she could ask him. Many that she wanted to, though her voice rattled and shook in the tightness of her throat. Already she had a faint regret for leaving her bed. Though her mind might be shrewd in waking, the rest of her was still weak from sickness.

“I would show you the fortress at large,” Zevran spoke finally, “but you are weak, and a single look at you would send the Inquisition to a frenzy. They hold you in high regard. Higher regard than I have ever seen an elf held to.”

Her lips parted. She desired to tell him that they were wrong to. That they saw in her an ambassador of Andraste that she could never aspire to be. The effort of declaring this, the futility of it, returned a familiar tiredness to her bones. She had done enough, she’d thought, but now there was more to do than ever before. They would not release her from this, the position of their so-called herald. Now they truly needed a figurehead – a reason to have survived for. Zevran stood before she could even begin to piece those thoughts together. Why tell him anyway? Why even feel the temptation to?

“Come.” His tone had turned kind. It ill suited his sharp features, but when she looked up into his face, she found that kinder lines had come to form about his eyes, the corners of his mouth. She realised there was far more to ask of him than she’d initially thought. “You should rest, girl, before the vultures come for you.”

He led her back through the narrow, dusty, uninhabited corridors, holding her to the shadows of what appeared almost a throne room before they, together, ascended a flight of stairs to what had become her new bedchamber. She understood in watching him move how easily he had fled Madame de Fer’s manor. His steps were soundless. His figure embraced the dark as much as it embraced him. None of that, however, prevented him from walking soundly into a woken Shimaya. They blustered together, him suddenly ungraceful in recovery, her tautly resentful.

“_Fenedhis!_ You bumbling oaf! Where have you taken her?”

“Hush! If you wish to have your hands upon me, my dear, you need only ask – ”

Niamh watched, bemused, as Shimaya struck upside the elf’s head with firm familiarity. Then her black eyes turned to the herald. The passage of emotion therein was more complex when their gazes met.

“You are being looked for, _lethallan_.”

She had scarce finished the sentence when Solas threw open the bedchamber’s door, concern flustering his pale cheeks to a heated pink. He took one look upon Niamh, sparing none for Zevran, and strode forward with chiding purpose. “You should be laid at rest,” he spoke in a repressed hiss. “Your fever is freshly broken – ”

“Even the sick require sustenance,” Zevran broke in. “Her more than most.”

Solas offered only a simmering glower. His hand upon Niamh’s wrist was firmer than the crow’s, pulling her inside before she had the chance to breathe, let alone agree that, perhaps, the food had done her good. The door was shut, and then he had turned to face her. Realising what he had done, he released her arm with sudden embarrassment, cleared his throat, and dared a step back.

“Forgive me. I grew concerned when you had left your bed.”

They stood, one opposite the other, each processing the moment that had transpired. Niamh silently pressed her wrist against her chest, loose fingertips playing along the skin there. When she did not speak, Solas awkwardly gestured to the bed, then to the door, then lost the trail of his hands altogether.

“I will leave you to your rest.”

“Why didn’t you come?” The question spilled out where all her queries for the crow had failed to. She hated the girlish resentment that bubbled beneath the words. She was not a child, after all. No longer was she that petulant girl. Solas blinked, taken aback, before he regained his composure with enviable elegance.

“You needed your rest – ”

“That has never stopped you before.”

He closed the distance. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to do. It seemed just as natural for her to step to him, too. To confirm that he had made the right choice – to stay, and not to leave.

And he did not leave that chamber, not for a while. Not now that she had found him, waited for him, that wolf who watched on the other side of the river.


	18. XVIII.

“_And so the sun rose again in the sky, and shone his golden light upon the earth. Elgar'nan and Mythal, with the help of the earth and the sun, brought back to life all the wondrous things that the sun had destroyed, and they grew and thrived. And that night, when the sun had gone to sleep, Mythal gathered the glowing earth around his bed, and formed it into a sphere to be placed in the sky, a pale reflection of the sun's true glory._”

\- Gisharel, Keeper of the Ralaferin clan, from _The Tale of Mythal’s Touch_

When night had fallen, painting the fortress in dark violet hues, navy like the glisten of a shrouded, twining river, Niamh took moments to consider how she had never quite admired her new shelter beneath the veil of a peaceful evening. First, she became entranced with the candlelight that she could see casting from every window – and if it was not a candle, it was a torch, hefted by a patrolling soldier, or anchored into a sliver of wall that her sharp eyes could decipher. There was a little bowl with a wick that flickered and faltered by her propped elbow, and she would take turns admiring the exterior, and then admiring that simple touch of light that danced so merrily by her side.

When he did not watch her in turn, she admired him. He reclined in that bed which she had lain sick in, for which she somewhat felt guilt – she did not think it would be a pleasant thing to endure the company of a bed that had withstood fever and tangled sheets. If this bothered him to any length, however, he did not show it. He was poised with such ease, such nonchalance, that at times Niamh found it hard to recognise him. That lack of recognition did not alarm her, however. It intrigued and, somehow, she felt that she had already known such a facet of his personality existed.

There were no wolves, no crows. No phantoms who lurked in the corners of her chamber, that had once seemed so foreboding, yet so listless. There was peace, and evening, and a warmth in her that even this candle that flickered by her elbow could not compare to.

In her, he saw a woman beyond ken. Her hair had come out of its braid, and it lay in jagged waves across her thin shoulders, sheathing her freckled cheeks, obscuring the mark of Andruil that traced her skin here and there. How small, he would think, and how frail a body it was to contain such a well of untapped power – to carry the weight of a belief that was not her own, deemed a herald for a woman she bore no sympathy toward. Yet the longer Solas studied her, the more faraway she felt – her thoughts barred behind the doors of her eyes, and the line of her body carefully wrapped around that fearsome, fiery thing that was her heart.

He, too, was intrigued.

“What is this place?” she finally asked. “It was you who led them here, wasn’t it?”

Questions. Questions were ever the rival of peace, but to be at peace with ignorance was something that Solas could never achieve. He should not expect such of others, either, no matter how easy it would be to never answer. He watched her, still – pretended that his idleness before his answer was simply born out of admiration.

“_Tarasyl’an Te’las_. Or, Skyhold, as it has come to be known. Leliana will regale you with the details, no doubt. She has been scouting its origins for days on end, wary that the dust and the cobwebs will be the cause of your end.”

“But you already know them,” Niamh pressed. Her fingers danced thoughtlessly over the candle that kept her company, playing a game of tag with its heat. “Can’t she simply ask you?”

“_Can_, yes. Whether she will trust the answer I give is another matter entirely.”

She turned to him, finally, a playful glint in her cool eyes as she took languid steps nearer to the bed. He did not reach out or beckon her, though he felt the instinct bubble and writhe beneath his skin as viscous as melting wax. It was not a matter of pride, nor wishing to appear aloof. As always, with questions and answers, multitudes of layers and _why for_’s could be uncovered – a lone answer would be too minuscule. She pressed a slender knee to the edge of the bed and loomed over him, her hair a drapery that brushed against his collarbone in tantalising tease.

“I would ask in what terrible way you’ve misbehaved to earn her distrust, but she is a mistress of spies. I would think that she trusts no-one.” When his expression shifted, a faint frown pulled at her brow. “Have I misspoken?”

“No. Once, you were but a girl representing her clan. Now you talk freely of spies and trust.”

“Because I am Dalish, you thought me naïve?”

“ – in a sense. Your clan does not delight in _the game_ so abundantly as the glittering courts of Orlais. You do not relish poison and assassination as do the princes of Antiva. Your world was your own, separate from these things, and now … ”

“I make my own way, Solas.” Though her body language remained warm, playful, her tone was firm. “I chose to _spy_ on the Conclave for my clan. I chose to remain here, to provide aid as only I could. If I have changed in the process, that is no matter. The interest of the world is the interest of my clan.”

He could not resist, then, that his fingers would flick up to catch wispy strands of brown between them – coax them back and forth, rub them into his skin that they might be memorised as eternal imprints. She settled beside him, against him – gave him leave to do this, to show an affection he felt he had no claim to.

“There are things you must know,” he said at length. “Details – _Corypheus_ – ” His fingers paused upon her strands of hair. How could he turn his heart so swiftly from such romantic gestures, close off this tremulous connection between them, move so carelessly from love to business –

“Tell me.” Her rasping voice an affirmative in this chamber of echoes. Solas understood why he could do all these things. Why he could dance that line of love so clumsily, and yet be forgiven in the same breath.

So he told her.

By the light of another candle, a king bowed his head over a sliver of parchment grasped within his fingertips. The doors to his grand chamber were left wide open, the guards beyond them long dismissed. He sat in solitude and misery, feeling with each moment of silence that he was mocked – by fate, by happenstance, by pure unfiltered scorn.

Alistair Theirin read the letter of his beloved again and again. Each line he read of it, he considered that he would become _furious_ – that he would lash out! Scatter that candle to the wall! Overturn some gold-encrusted trinket! Rip the blankets and the mattress from a bed that was now too large for him to occupy by rights! Yet he would regain that grief which hollowed him out from within, and rather than be furious, he would be confused. Hurt. Bereft.

Was this not their battle to fight together? Were not the odds theirs to surmount, hand in hand with the other? There were no secrets kept between them. There were no coy avoidances. If the future coloured itself harsh and unforgiving, so be it – they two would face it together. Queen and king. Beloved.

But she had left. Gone, without him. Gone, stubborn-headed girl, the love of his life – not bowing to the inevitable, but working against it, her crown set aside but not forgotten.

She had left him alone. She had left herself alone.

_Do not wait for me to return, my love_, the parchment chided him with familiar tone. _I will not go forgotten into the night._


	19. XIX.

“‘_Sign your confession,’ they said. I'm trying. I can't think of what name to sign._”

\- confessions from an unknown templar

Skyhold was unlike anything that Zevran Arainai had known before. Perhaps it was because he hailed from Antiva, a land of warmth and spice and the treasures of life – whether it be gold or flesh or some mixture of both. Perhaps it was because _adventure_, to him, tasted like worn-out tents, scavenged foodstuffs, and a crackling fire beside which a nightingale sang. A grand fortress, an inquisition, a simmering veil, the spirit of Andraste – or someone else entirely – were all things that, once, he would have considered beyond his ken. Far larger, far more significant, than one Zevran Arainai would ever find himself tangled in.

And yet, here he was. Here they all were. Visages from every walk of life, pasts of every flavour. Dalish, human, dwarven; Antivan, Nevarran, Orlesian. Each corner he took and wandered would lead him past a different tale, a different cause for summoning. Yet for every cause, there was no lack of determination.

It was all done for _her_. The name that some were still too hesitant to speak. Others were brave enough to whisper it. Niamh of clan Lavellan. The _herald_, if those words seemed too foreign, too weighted to fit around one’s lips. The lithe maiden who had risen from ice and snow reincarnated, some thought – a spectre carried into their midst within his own arms when all had given her up for dead. She seemed immortal where the Divine had perished. Untouchable, where their haven had been destroyed.

And what of him? What of Zevran Arainai, that wanton elf who had brought her back to them?

Leliana cautioned him against embracing their high regard. She had called the masses fickle in their adoration. She was suspicious, paranoid, that the moment they remembered their herald was an elf, they would revert to their true natures. Zevran was not Dalish, but neither was he human. He had never been looked upon with particular fondness in either clan or city. Yet ... it was intoxicating. It was a relief. As much as he had never known anything like Skyhold, he had also never known what it was to be gazed upon with such _awe_ – not even when he had adventured with the now King and Queen of Ferelden. No – even then, he had taken on the role of a pillar that held up the chamber, rather than the throne which commanded the eye. The names of Cousland and Theirin had found the tomes of history, but not Arainai. Not Leliana. Not Morrigan, or Sten, nor even Wynne. He had beheld the intemperate tides of the world, but he had slipped as easily from that high perch as he had stumbled upon it.

They would not let him, here. They would not let him forget who he was, what he had done – not just in bringing Niamh back to them, but in saving what few he could in the ravaged village of Haven itself. Where he had cursed himself for being futile, for arriving too late to save more, they lavished him with the hushed title of _hero_. It was not quite _herald_, but it sounded similar if he closed his ears enough. It felt as cooling as a cold, chuckling river. As soothing, like sweet nectar from the bottom of a bottle.

He had to remind himself of Leliana’s words. He had to remind himself that he had not saved them to be adored, but because he could not let them perish. He had seen Corypheus’ army. He remembered the horror of the darkspawn, and the vision had inspired much of the same guttural dread in him. The knowledge that the world’s intemperate tides were once again churning, tugging at the taut strings of time.

There was a similar current in the air. A current that spoke of something afoot – something changing, something vast, something that could only be witnessed once and then never quite again. The fortress whispered restlessly. The determined visages glanced between each other with poorly disguised excitement. Zevran moved smoothly through them like a knife through silk. They saw him coming, and they fell quiet, and they waited for him to react likewise to that which he had no knowledge of. So, wordlessly, he followed their tide. His worn leather boots carried him to the courtyard, overlooked by sweeping stone stairs – stairs which led to the grand hall of the greater fortress.

He saw her again as he had once beheld her in Madame de Fer’s manse, though now she stood above him and he below. With his chin tilted up, he found his breath momentarily stolen from him by the elegant figure she cut. No longer was she a wan waif he had dug and retrieved from the snow, but a woman stood solidly upon her own two feet. Freshly dressed in noble colours, hair neatly braided and fallen over one shoulder. Though others stood with her, he could only really regard her alone. A herald is no queen, but do they not inspire the same grandeur? Are they not both equally graceful?

Their eyes met across the courtyard, and for a moment he let himself imagine that she too could only see him. That she did not take note of the long, elegant sword Leliana hefted in her hands, near ceremonial in its nature. Foolish, of course. He was not the only one to gaze up at Niamh Lavellan with such stirrings of heart … and yet, she did not look away from him. It was him that she gazed back upon, like slanting sunlight over melting snow.

“Inquisitor _whatsit_,” a petulant voice bemoaned at his side. He could make out, from the corner of his eye, short-cropped blonde hair, a wrinkled snub nose. “Why’re they giving her a _sword?_ She’s never used _swords_ before.”

“It’s not about her _using_ it, Buttercup.” Varric, who stood next to the bored elf, scratched idly at his too-oft broken nose. “It’s the _formality_ of it. More striking holding up a sword than a staff. Folks’ll think you need one of those to get around.”

“What, like old people or sommat?”

“_Shh!_” The scribe of the Inquisition, as Zevran had made note to himself, pushed a slender brown finger up to her lips. She turned back to the proceedings before her with an inspired sparkle to her eye – one not quite shared by either the protesting elf or the chuckling dwarf. Zevran smiled faintly and, to his surprise, found that the herald was still watching him even past his distraction. So, he smiled a little more, and found himself mouthing to her, _Take it,_ as though she would need the encouragement. As though he was one she should look to for such things.

Yet, she heeded him. Niamh Lavellan took the Inquisitor’s sword into her palm. Awkwardly, uncertainly, she hefted it into the air. Once she had measured its weight, grown used to it, confidence bled back into the line of her shoulders. Her small chin tilted upward. The crowd which had gathered in the courtyard all begun to cheer. Such a small gesture, insignificant really in the face of Corypheus’ vast army, and yet … yes, the dwarf was right. It was about the formality of it. It was, in a way, giving permission for hope to bloom and multiply.

It reminded him of another scene, so long ago. A queen freshly crowned, who had caught his eye across a grand hall, bewildered, almost amused at the fate which had befallen her. Why, they had only been slaying darkspawn so long ago, and now … she found him in the midst of the feast. He remembered how her pale hand had shadowed and warmed his knuckles, startling him up from a cup of rather flat wine.

“It’s all a bit much, isn’t it?” He could remember her nervously giggling voice still, almost smothered by the bustle around them. “You’ve hardly touched your wine.”

“Nor you yours,” he had chided, summoning mirth into his tone. “_Ah_, but you are saving it all for the honeymoon, yes? Such hours of decadence – ”

“Not so loud! You’ll have Alistair red to his ears.”

“The wrong direction for the blood to flow.”

“_Zevran!_”

He had near gloated in how he made her laugh, even despite her anxiety. He could have revelled in her rich, rolling delight for the rest of the evening. When he found himself thinking of such, he smartly withdrew his hand. Alistair was red to his ears, but not from overhearing. He himself had abundantly partaken of the wine.

“You have given them hope, you know,” he found himself saying, dumbly, as though he knew what hope was. As though he could tell her, the queen of Ferelden, anything that she did not already know. She stared at him, just as startled as he had been but moments earlier. To his surprise, she took his words earnestly.

“Do you think so, Zevran? Truly?”

He had lifted the cup to his lips, finally. Let the red touch them like blood, his or hers or any of their companions’. Violence bred a peculiar intimacy in them all, didn’t it?

“You have given _me_ hope, my dear.”

By the time he returned to himself from that depth of memory, the herald had disappeared from her pedestal. Leliana lingered, her hands tucked behind her back, her gaze searching for his to return. He wondered if she had thought of the same evening. If she had seen the same spirit in Niamh that he now saw.

“Just saying,” the elf girl between him and Varric spoke, loud enough to sail straight to the stairs and beyond, “it’s all a bit useless. What’s she gonna do with a _sword?_”


	20. XX.

“_When first I summoned her, she was a rose,  
Unwithering, unchanging, and unthorned,  
A spirit of the purest love one knows,  
Who never hated, coveted, or scorned._”

\- Magister Oratius, from Sonnet 126, _The Lover and His Spirit_

“They’ll make me a staff,” Niamh mused idly. Her fingertips trekked along a bare, sand-yellow wall, while her eyes were held captive by a mural in its making. She had heard so much talk of Solas’ budding artistry, yet somehow had never mustered the courage to visit and witness him in his creative prime. His nimble weight was half-balanced on a ladder now, though she found it impossible to imagine his ankle rolling, his litheness falling to crumple upon the floor. Clumsiness, she thought, was not his vice of choice. “The sword – it’s a little useless.”

She saw his profile crease into a smile, and felt the reward of it burst as warmth throughout her chest. It was silly. She had never considered herself particularly romantic, girlish – whatever number of words one could assign to the sensation of moths fluttering about in one’s stomach. She, too, had always been regarded as _reserved_ – hostile at worst. Now, the simple glance of a smile across his thoughtful lips sent a thrill, a tremor, through her that would have had her snickering in contempt at the Conclave. That day when they first met.

Such a derisive girl she had been.

Now, she had regained her strength. That long trek through the snow felt as though it had happened to someone wholly other. She could not, in truth, regale how many days it had been since that ordeal. She remembered very little of it, or perhaps she feigned so. Perhaps it was easier to close off that cold, that icy valley she thought she would die in, into a well of memory that no-one would glimpse into ever again. There was the _here_. The now. Solas on a stepladder, painting wide, vibrant brush strokes across a pale turmeric wall. Her fingers skipped and skidded and teased the round of his heel, and she thought she saw the tips of his ears glow a little pinker. Certainly he twisted about to peer down at her, distracted at last from his grand illustration.

“Make?” he queried, as though only just now regarding her words. “Has some grand weaponsmith been commissioned for a staff of your very own?” His tone was mocking in a pleasant way, his point no doubt that she _had_ a staff. A new one was wholly unnecessary. A ceremonial Inquisitor’s staff was ever more useless – the _title_ of Inquisitor, they both knew without spoken word, was a trivial and infantile thing. Or perhaps she considered it so because he did – the truth, in all its angles, would likely fall closer to that she didn’t know what to think of it. The truth was that it felt very much thrust upon her, as that useless sword had been shoved into the cusp of her palm.

Her palm cupped his ankle. Her fingers slid up his calf. With a soft, yearning sigh, Solas set down his brush. In an instant, he had descended to sweep her up in his arms. Now, the two wolves intertwined. Now, his hot breath playing across her cheek. Now, her imagining his lips devoured in hers, until they turned sweet and red as berries. His brow grazed against her own, and his hand warmed the small of her back until she felt the heat spread to the pit of her belly – the high points of her cheeks.

“You are exquisite,” he whispered, and the words tingled against her thighs. Her eyes closed, her head slipped back. It was the gentle gesture of an animal offering itself up to the beast. He did not partake. When she opened her eyes again, there was a curious sadness to his expression. It came and went in moments he did not think that she watched – moments, perhaps, where he looked into that forbidden well of memory and saw how very nearly she had slipped from his grasp. That was what she told herself. There were moments still where she was uncertain – when that sorrow felt very old, and very untouchable. She reached up to touch his cheek.

“Why do you do that?” she asked plainly. “Look at me like that?” He raised a hand and held it over hers, and the sadness furrowed into a creased brow of consternation. Rather than answer her, he sealed his mouth harshly and roughly over hers. They scrambled until her back hit the plain yellow wall, and his thigh pressed between hers. The sound that came out of her then was not made up of syllables, but a startled whimper. Then, a pleased one.

Their passion could not be contained to a singular chamber. Her thoughts brushed over the shadows that fell through its entrance, or the staircase that led ever up to a spymistress’ lair – but his embrace was so cloying, the nip of his teeth on her pout so intoxicating, that she writhed and pulsed against him, her jagged breaths growing louder and louder until, with clumsy hands and furtive motions, they etched their own mural onto the wall. It was not with paint, not with colours that the eye could see – but the colours that she felt when he pressed into her, the spread of magenta and hues all across her body as he found his home. It became emerald when he murmured into her ear, and her glassy eyes remembered forests on the ceiling – rivers and wolves and secret trysts.

He pulled away when he remembered himself, his fingers fidgeting at the hem of his pantaloons, her robes ruffled high up her thighs. She did not straighten them immediately. She watched him with her breath cascading out of her throat. His surface was that of an undisturbed pond, but she had felt his true nature push against his skin. It excited her. It seemed to trouble him.

“Forgive me,” he whispered. He appeared so chastised that she had to force herself to break her reverie. With a harsh, rasping chuckle, she moved to him – smoothed her thumbs over his jaw, guided their tips over his blushing skin.

There was a soft clearing of throat.

It was hard to surmise how long Varric had stood witnessing them, but by the uneasy cant of his posture, it was likely better to assume he had not intentionally watched or listened. When he caught Niamh’s eye, he cast a sheepish grin almost to the side of her, not quite meeting her gaze. That was unusual in and of itself, and it gave her enough pause to drop her hands from her lover’s visage.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he drawled. “Got, _ah_ – important Inquisitor business.”

“It’s good, you know. Seeing you happy. Seeing you _alive_.”

He was rambling, awkward – not at all the master of prose that Niamh had begun to relate to his name. Supposedly he had sold many books. Supposedly he was quite infamous in his own right. As he strolled back and forth along one of Skyhold’s many balconies, the sunlight occasionally dappling his saffron hair, he seemed extraordinarily self-contained and meek. She found herself frowning despite herself, which must have alarmed him in turn, for he quickly reared up and held his hands aloft.

“It’s not my place, I know. Just – you deserve some good things, Fangs. Really.”

“You’re being alarming. _Very_ alarming.”

A more familiar, good-natured laugh left him – but even that seemed more ashamed of itself than it had any right to be. “That bad, huh? Well – it’s time I owned up, and it’s easier to own up to you than to … well, any of your other _advisors_.” He lifted a broad finger to the bridge of his nose, scratching it, contemplating the stretch of courtyard below. When he let his breath out, Niamh imagined he was shrugging an entire world off of his shoulders. “It’s about Hawke. The, uh – _champion of Kirkwall_.”

She had heard of the tale – vaguely at first, as vaguely as she had heard legends of the hero of Ferelden. More intimately, now that she had associated with so many of the Inquisition. The Lady Pentaghast especially had borne an iron will to find this man named Hawke. Perhaps he would have led the organisation in Niamh’s stead. He would have, no doubt, been more qualified – even more acceptable to public perception, despite his sordid history. Of course, Niamh and all of her ‘other advisors’ had been left under the impression that he was vanished; indisposed.

“He’s not,” Varric said, as though reading her mind. “_Uh_, you know … he’s not as, ah, out of touch as – what I’m saying is – ”

“Is he here?”

The dwarf blinked. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then seemed to unite with his resolve. Rather than amble aimlessly about the balcony, he stepped to Niamh, glancing left and right even though there were none there to overhear. None, at least, that either of them could sense or see.

“I need you to understand something, Fangs. Hawke … isn’t the same as he used to be. The things that happened in Kirkwall? Those are the kinds of things that leave a mark on someone. _Permanently_. Something I think you know a lot about.” He gestured toward her hand humourlessly. “There’s a reason I’ve tried to keep him out of all of this.”

“Varric. Is he here?”

The air rushed out of Varric a second time, though hastened now. Riled. “_Yes_, and … and no. _Soon_. He wrote me. I know him. He can’t stay away, no matter what … no matter what he thinks of himself. I just need you to know, Fangs – he’s not like you. Not like you are now. He’s sacrificed enough, you understand me? Sacrificed _more_ than enough.”

She didn’t understand the implication, fully. The implication that somehow she was fruit ripe for sacrifice. That her blood was still fresh enough to suffer the feeling of loss, of ice and snow weighing upon her skeleton until she wished for nothing more than sweet release – an escape from trial and ordeal, over and over. Varric seemed to come back into himself, realise what he had said, and a look of shame bloomed over him. It was simultaneous to a look of steeled will. Niamh then understood. She was _Fangs_, but Hawke was Hawke. It wasn’t about her ripeness, an expectation for her to suffer. It was about things that people did not say about heroes. Stories that are told over and over, and yet never linger on what those stories do to a man, either vaguely known or intimately retold.

“I won’t tell anyone,” she said at length. “You can turn him away, if you’d like.” Varric shook his head.

“It’s not that easy, but … not telling anyone? That’s a start. He won’t make too much noise either. He’s good at that – always has been.” He swallowed. “But he’ll want to meet you. He’ll … want to know whose hands the world’s in right now.”

_These hands were nothing against Corypheus. They were nothing against the ice of nature. These hands can barely form fists in the morning, when I swear I see faces watching me from the corners of my room. They can’t hold a world. They can barely hold myself. These hands, these hands, these hands._

“Then let him come,” Niamh heard herself say. Already she felt miles away, buried beneath an avalanche, frozen against the world. “We can measure out our scars, together.”


	21. XXI.

“_A second time I drew her 'cross the Veil,  
And shared a walk, a dance, a stolen kiss;  
With such a perfect beauty, pure and pale,  
No woman could compare, no man resist._”

\- Magister Oratius, from Sonnet 126, _The Lover and His Spirit_

_He won’t make too much noise either. He’s good at that._

Those words stuck like dried sap to Niamh’s mind as she eyed down the Herald’s Rest. Supposedly it had been named for her, in that rare chance she might take to rest anywhere that was not her bedchamber. She _was_, in their eyes, the Herald. Or the Inquisitor. Idly, she wondered if they were to rename the tavern now that she had a far more official title.

Well. This was an inn – a loud one. A busy one.

Varric was fidgeting, but Niamh detected an undercurrent of excitement to accompany his nerves. Perhaps it was the environs – dimly lit yet still jovial, candlelight shedding illumination on secretive conversations and boisterous exchanges alike. Perhaps it was the notion of reuniting with Hawke. She did not think he would go out of his way to risk the Inquisition’s ire for just anyone. She did not think any of his affected nature was put-on, as some way to manipulate her.

Niamh did not think that Varric would ever truly manipulate her, even if he may others.

“Upstairs,” he rasped as the door closed behind them. Already eyes were turning to her, conversations running their length to an abrupt stop. Niamh had never known what it was like, really, to step into a room and watch it fall silent because of her and her alone. She felt like a statue wheeled in on the back of a wagon. She felt as though she had to be still, elegant, or they would remember what she was again – some heretic Dalish elf. “Fangs? C’mon. They’ll remember their drinks soon enough.”

He was right, and the touch of his square fingertips on her elbow guided her along the cramped floor. A bard plucked at strings near the fireplace, eyeing her with a spark of inspiration in a coy gaze. There were Inquisition faces, soldiers, but others too that Niamh did not recognise. Mercenaries? Merchants? Simply passers-by? She tried to remember all of the individuals that had passed through the camps of her youth. Deshanna would turn most of them away, but some slipped through – the respectful ones, or the quiet ones. They had come from all walks of life, even if Niamh had been too wary to appreciate such diversity then. The stairs of the tavern creaked under their combined weight, and they surfaced upon an overlooking balcony, more closely crowded tables and curiosity. Varric, however, was sure of his step. He headed to a far corner, steering Niamh with a nonchalant cheer that seemed, somehow, to deflect prolonged interest.

“Why would he come here?” she found herself asking the dwarf. “Wouldn’t he rather remain unseen?”

“Sometimes, Fangs, the most unseen places are the obvious ones. People think too smart. So smart, they don’t look under their noses.” He stopped her at a table which, at first, she thought was unoccupied. Then she realised that its sole occupant was mostly obscured by a dark hood. A touch too on the nose, she wryly imagined, but perhaps – well, perhaps Varric was right. The most unseen _could_ be the most obvious. The figure shifted, leaned back in their chair. A deep, bored voice murmured thoughtfully from beneath the hood’s shadow.

“Took your time, didn’t you?”

“_Relax_,” Varric answered easily, as though he had met here every night with this particular individual. As though this were simple habit. “Start complaining too much, you’ll get _everyone_ looking at you. Garrett, this is Fangs. Fangs, meet Garrett.”

She had always heard _Hawke_ this, and _Hawke_ that. It was peculiar to hear another name assigned to this strange and mythical figure. An arm sheathed in leather gauntlet peered out from under Garrett’s cloak, and he extended an open, worn palm. She touched it briefly with her own. His skin was rough, cool. Whoever he was, whatever he had done, he had done so enough for calluses to form and wear away, over and over again. Deshanna had always told her to respect those with labourers’ hands. Those same hands rose up and pulled the hood down with little flourish, little care even for whoever looked their way. She was surprised, though she did not know who she had expected to look back at her now with those hard, cold eyes, a nose once split and mended over with a scar over its bridge. His skin was speckled with weather and healed wounds, his close-cropped hair the colour of a stormy sky. Though the skin between his brows was creased with frequent frowns, she could make out faint laughter lines too. The memory of them did not take away from how critically he observed her. _Suspiciously_, she realised.

He grunted. “Thought you’d be a little bigger,” he murmured, before reaching for a barely touched cup of what she suspected was only water. “Elves, I suppose. Always lithe. Always fitting into places they shouldn’t.”

“How’s Fenris, by the way?” Varric cut in smoothly. “Lithe? Getting into places he shouldn’t?” Garrett shot the dwarf a dirty, if amused, look. Then, he set his cup down with a dismissive wave.

“Here and there. He has his own demons to fight.”

“Tell him to come along sometime. _Plenty_ of demons to go around, now.”

Garrett simply grunted, and Niamh felt a sudden collision against her calf as he kicked the chair opposite him. “Sit,” he commanded, and she no longer felt the Inquisitor in his presence. To him, she realised, she was just a _girl_. “Stand there gawking and I’ll have a whole line of admirers. Niamh, was it?”

“Yes,” she managed. She sat, not necessarily because she wanted to, but because the close quarters of the building and the stifling body heat had begun to wear at her. She had regained some of her strength, but not all of it. The ceiling seemed to loom a little closer even as she leaned against the table. Garrett watched her, and briefly his hard gaze softened. Wordlessly, he pushed his cup across to her.

“She’s been through a lot,” she heard Varric murmur gently. “More than anyone should, in her place. Everyone’s convinced that she’s, well – you know. Some sign from Andraste, or the Divine. Depends on who you ask.”

“She’s a puppet, you mean.” Garrett fell back in his chair, crossing his toned arms over his chest. “The Divine is dead. Andraste’s looking elsewhere. It’s easier to _make_ claims than to substantiate them.”

“Maybe. But – look. Fangs, show him your hand.”

She did not want to be anyone’s puppet, least of all show off all her limbs according to a mouthy dwarf’s whims. She let her palm fall open to the ceiling anyway, allowing a glimmer of emerald to reflect itself in Garrett’s eye. Even then, it was not so bright as she remembered. Murky and obscured, somehow, as if by smoke. _Someone smoking a pipe nearby_, she told herself, though she could not pick up the tell-tale scent. The champion himself remained unfazed, even if his gaze did not stray from the mark.

“That could be anything. You know the dangers of magic as well as I do, old friend. I highly doubt the Divine or Andraste or anyone’s aunt pressed that mark into her hand at the Conclave and bid her good fortune.”

“_No_.” A sudden certainty seized Niamh, and she glared up at Garrett Hawke. “It was not the Divine, nor Andraste – and it was not for good fortune, either.” She could not say where those words came from. Her memories of the Conclave were as obscured now as the mark seemed upon her hand. Yet, she knew. She had always known, viscerally, that she was no herald of the Divine, nor of Andraste. She knew that the mark had come from neither of them. The champion studied her again, long and hard, before he too leaned back over the table toward her.

“I didn’t come here to see if you were the herald of Andraste. I came because I heard mention of Corypheus. How much do you know of him, girl?”

Only what Solas had told her. Only that he possessed an artefact of _elvhen_ origin – possessed something that did not and never would belong to him. Only that he would use it for ill. That, somehow or another, the mark on her hand led back to this – connected her to him. “I know enough.”

He told her more, then – more of his own connection to the Elder One. The candles wavered listlessly on their perches, shifting facets of warm, dusky light over each of their faces. For a time, Niamh even forgot that they were surrounded by so many others, that every so often a pair of eyes would train upon her from on high or below. If any had the whim to disturb them, they did not. Their trio was left to their own devices, even once the Herald’s Rest began to empty out into the deepening night. By then, she had unconsciously drained Hawke’s cup of water. She sat a little straighter in her chair, and his stern visage bled through a myriad of expressions – exhaustion, worry, regret. He fidgeted too, like Varric had done. Fingered the knives he had sheathed at his sides; tapped the tip of his boot against the wooden floorboards, as though testing them for hollows.

“I should’ve – _could’ve_ – done more,” he finished flatly. “I thought I had … thought I had put an end to him. I was sure. I could’ve been surer.”

“He was dead,” Varric insisted, shaking his head. Niamh noted that his shoulders slumped once more with an invisible weight – guilt. Corypheus was far from dead. They could all agree on that now. Furthermore, the implications of Hawke’s tale were chilling. The creature imagined himself a magister who had looked upon the Golden City, if such a thing were truly possible. He was a man displaced from time – _time_. Niamh knew well the fickle webs of time. She knew how it could be twisted, manipulated. The differences that could be made with a single whisper.

“I would like to help,” Garrett offered at last. “If you would have me. Many wouldn’t, in your shoes. Especially – especially as you are.”

Her eyes flicked up sharply, studying the cool pinpricks of his. The stories she had heard of Kirkwall were only that, she told herself – stories. She had learnt first-hand now that the tales that were told were not always so close to the truth. In her hesitation to answer, however, he read his own little story. His gaze was duly averted.

“You’ve done your part, Garrett,” Varric began cautiously. Niamh recalled the dwarf’s words from before. Hawke had sacrificed more than enough. He did not want the _shem_ to shed any more blood on anyone’s behalf. What the storyteller might conceptualise for Hawke’s future, however, the man himself did not seem to share. The line of his mouth hardened, and his surliness returned to his posture, closing inward or keeping out. It was difficult to say in the guttering light of the Herald’s Rest.

“What we do is not in parts,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Sometimes, Varric, we have a duty.”

“_Fuck_ duty, Hawke! Haven’t they put you through enough? You don’t owe anything to them!”

It was the first time Niamh heard emotion break Varric Tethras’ voice. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that he was more than his jests. More than the stories he told of others. He remembered himself just as swiftly, his expression abashed, his form suddenly shrinking within his chair. Then, he pressed his brow to his open hand and heaved out a sigh. Rather than appear incensed, Garrett simply leaned further over the table and slapped his fist on the back of the dwarf’s shoulder. He smiled for the first time.

“I can give a little more, Varric,” he spoke lightly. “You know that.”

It was not the answer that Varric wanted to hear, Niamh knew, but he smiled weakly back. Wordlessly, he lifted his own fist to lightly graze against Hawke’s knuckles. It seemed a small gesture for the fondness they shared between them.

The Champion of Kirkwall slipped into the midnight, unseen and unnoticed, as silently departing as he had arrived. For a time, Niamh and Varric sat together. Once empty, the Herald’s Rest became a sacred sort of refuge. All romantic candlelight and creeping shadows, as soft and beckoning as dark crushed velvet. The Inquisitor imagined herself falling into its soft embrace. Falling, falling, never reaching back up. Closing her eyes to dream, with no duty left to her to open them.

Varric’s voice broke her reverie.

“It’s getting late, Fangs.” His tone was cordial, but she knew that he was battling with demons of his own, deep inside. He offered a tired smile. “Thanks for coming, and for meeting with him. I know I asked a lot.”

She softly shrugged. It was not alien to her to keep secrets. To do things in the dark. The spy of clan Lavellan, the outcast – that had always been her part. The shadows had always been her home. “I think you asked more of yourself, Varric.”

“_Ha._ Now that’s some philosophising for another time. After a good, long night of sleep. You been sleeping alright, Fangs?”

The question caught her off-guard. She thought of myriad nightmares, of the slender hand of an apostate elf who drew her from their depths time and time again. She always awoke rested enough from such encounters, but it had been some time since she had simply slept. The thought of that alone brewed a heaviness in her bones, tugged at her strings with a deep, yearning yawn. Watching, the dwarf rumbled forth a knowing chuckle. A twinkle arrived in his eye that had not been there before.

“Think that says enough. I’ll leave you to find your own bedchambers. Don’t want Chuckles coming after me in a fit of jealousy.”

The image of Solas jealous amused her enough to smile, faintly. Varric’s chair drew back with a loud groan, and at that precise moment, a great cheer erupted from overhead. When they both glanced up, Sera was leaning over an overlooking railing, applauding with somewhat aggressive ferocity.

“Took you two long enough! Only been tryin’ to sleep for – ”

Her venomous chiding was interrupted with soft laughter, one that did not belong to her, yet one that Niamh intrinsically recognised. It was the sort of laugh that would belong to a man watching her from another balcony, another place, a mask obscuring his features. A laugh that belonged to another hand that pulled her from a blanket of cloying snow. Before she could stop herself, a faint blush climbed up her cheeks. If anyone took heed of it, fortunately, no-one commented on it.

“Alright, alright,” Varric hummed nonchalantly. “I can tell when I’ve outstayed my welcome.” He offered Niamh a casual salute off his temple, his shadow extending behind him as he moved to the tavern door. There was a whisper of cold, wintry air, a breath of frost, and then all was dipped back into the glow of amber candlelight. For a moment, Niamh had forgotten to breathe. Her thoughts had been swallowed by an unmarked grave in a mountain pass.

“_Oi!_” Sera called down. “Inquisi-tits! Got your head up by the moons or somethin’?”

“Or something,” she answered absently. Her chair barely groaned when she pushed it back. They had left her trunks of new clothes in her bedchambers, offered to craft her the finest pieces of armour, yet still she clung to her old and tested garb, with a garland of wolf fur that hugged closely to her nape and warmed her shoulders. She pulled it tightly around her as she glanced back up. Sera regarded her with a crinkled nose and suspicious eyes. Somewhere behind her, a slim shadow loomed. “I’m sorry for keeping you up, Sera.”

She felt complex layers of emotion for the young elf girl. She was neither Dalish, nor did she seem to empathise with her city-living kin. Her identity seemed to revolve around being a _Red Jenny_ – something wholly foreign to Niamh, whose goals appeared both noble and ignoble simultaneously. She could not summon up the same contempt she might have for any other _seth’lin_, even though Sera had abundant contempt of her own. Nor did she particularly pity the girl. In a way, Sera had more surety in her path than Niamh had in hers. This so-called herald of Andraste should be pitied for how lost _she_ was.

At her soft words, Sera reared back, straightening up off the railing. She huffed, crossed her arms over her chest, and watched as Niamh took her own leave through the tavern door. The winter splashed across her face in a sharp slap, clenching her teeth together. This was the most alone she had been in a while, she thought. Her dreams ever had Solas, and the fortress was ever alive and warm with bustle. Under the mantle of deep, dark night, the smothering snow, there was a peace and silence that was both relieving and terrifying. Terrifying, foremost, because it reminded her of her close brush with death. What bore more silence than the afterlife, after all?

She walked slowly back, taking the scenic route, turning about and extending her pace with every excuse she could. With each step, she grew gradually certain that she was not alone, yet that did not pierce her loneliness. The silence of the night was not broken. She stopped many paces away, in some bend behind the stables where the snow clumped and layered itself into small mountains. She knelt and dipped her hand into the white, a delicious chill spiralling up her forearm.

“You can stop hiding now,” she spoke aloud into the cold-glazed air. He had not ever truly been hiding. Hiding would make more of an attempt at masking his voice, his shadow. If he truly desired to, she was sure, he would never have been detectable – even slightly. He was toying with her, or he underestimated her. She did not think he would do the latter.

His shadow sliced across the anthills of snow. Then, he knelt beside her. His hood was pulled up, but she could see out of the corner of her eye the yellow hair that curled against his brown cheek, and the three dark lines inked into them that was not like any _vallaslin_ she was familiar with. His lashes were long, she noticed, observing him up close. And then, of course, she realised she was fully perusing him – not watching him out of the corner of her eye at all. He turned his head and smiled, a cocky mischievous gesture, his own fingertips trailing in the mush of snow.

“I was not hiding,” he declared in his peculiarly melodious voice. It seemed impossibly loud after the silence of the winter, even though he was soft-spoken by nature. She arched an eyebrow, unconvinced, and that familiar laughter spilled out of him like a pulse of warm blood. “If I hid, my dear, you would not find me.”

“If I wanted it so, you couldn’t have followed me.”

“_Oh?_ So you mean to say that you desired to be followed?”

Again, that flood of a blush beneath her cheeks that she could not control. She prayed he would think it was the result of the chill blistering her skin, or that the silvering mist they both exhaled would obscure her features, render him oblivious. The knowing quirk of the corner of his mouth, however, and the way his sharp eyes darted over her complexion was proof enough that he was not fooled. His fingertips strayed nearer to hers, carving slender paths in the packed snow. Then, he stopped short.

“This reminds you, _mm?_” His visage softened. “The snow, and the cold.”

“Of?”

“The night that I found you.”

She remembered precious little of that, she wanted to say. She remembered her wavering consciousness, the warmth of his chest pressed up close to her as he carried her. She had not been carried like that before – like a precious thing, something or someone to be protected. She wished it had not been him, she wanted to say. She wished it had not been anyone. His eyes swayed back up to hers, his cocky smile gone, and he retrieved his hand with considerate grace. He offered it to her, palm up.

“You will catch a chill,” he said simply. She watched him impassively. Her hands curled up off the snow, closer to herself. After a moment, she took his grasp.

His skin was warm and dry, even after its brush against the snow. He felt like how she imagined the sun would, if the sun was wrought of flesh, and if the sun would not singe her at her proximity. _Maybe he will singe me_, she found herself thinking. _Maybe if I step too close again, I will burn._ She did not. He pulled her up, to her feet, dancing precariously near, and he was only warm. He was only comforting.

“You do not sleep, do you?” he asked. “There are shadows under your eyes, my dear.”

“You’re only asking that because you overheard my conversation with Varric,” she answered flatly. “I know you were there, in the tavern with Sera.”

“I know that you know. I was not hiding, like I said.”

“Were you following me?”

“_Mm_ – a strong word for mere curiosity.”

“Mere curiosity has you stalking me like prey?”

“Like prey, you say? Surely if you are prey, I will have bitten by now?”

“There’s still time for it.”

They watched each other, lightly tangled in arms and posture, his warmth and her cold, shrouded in the fog that billowed from their lungs. He smiled again, though the arrogance from before was tucked away. Then, with a single step he glided apart, though he kept her hand in his.

“Come,” he almost chided her. “I will walk you to your bedchambers, and risk your lover’s jealousy.”

Jealousy was a strange word that cut edges into her cheeks. He held her hand lightly, and it was only when they had passed the steps to the fortress that she considered that her head was faint, her shoulders shaking with cold. Perhaps he had been following her because she herself was not a picture of good health. If any would know that of her, he would foremost, her snowy saviour. Yet if there would be a sign of her so-called lover’s jealousy – was that what they were? Could she call Solas _lover_? – or even of his lingering presence in his sequestered room of murals, it did not come to pass upon them. Zevran took soft, silent steps that roused no eye or ear, and she slipped as easily from shadow to shadow, until she could fool herself that she was _his_ shadow, long and fading. He guided her up the steps to her bedchamber, led her to the quilts and sat her on the edge of her bed with the long, kind patience of a man beyond his years.

“Why?” she blurted out, his hand having barely left hers. “Why did you save me?” He paused, caught off-guard, his eyes sharp and shrewd before he remembered to be gentle.

“Would you not have saved yourself, in my stead?”

“No,” she thought she answered honestly. Flustered, she elaborated. “You didn’t know me. I was a stranger to you.”

“_Ah_, but you are wrong. Word has spread of you. They talk of you in the tall shade of forests, to the taller shade of cities. You are under everyone’s breath. You are a miracle.”

“I am no miracle. I’m not what they say I am.”

“Does the truth matter so much, in the end? They will believe what they believe. The stories that are told of you – they will tell many lies, but in some of the lies, there will be a greater truth.”

His words were mired in honey and silks, fuzzing through her mind like withering dreams, brittle memories. They did not make sense, she told herself. There were truths and there were lies, but they could not be one and the same. She could not be herself, _and_ the herald of Andraste. Those lofty titles the _shem_ held her up to, or scorned her for, she had never desired, nor did they fit her. “There is no truth in them,” she told him stubbornly. “The truth is that I am only myself. Not a herald. Barely an _inquisitor_.”

“And yet you held up the sword. I saw you do so, no?”

She set her jaw, curling her arms inward about herself. A defensive, shrinking posture that she was barely conscious of before she carried it out. “It was what they wanted,” she mumbled, staring down at her feet. They seemed small, easily lost in the plush carpeting of the chamber, even in their frostbitten boots. She felt like a mere child within this ancient fortress, surrounded by so many strangers. So many foreign ideals. After a time, Zevran knelt before her. When he took her shoulders, she was reminded of the warmth of spring again, and her tension eased.

“Do you believe in the legend of Andraste?” It was an earnest question on his part. At any other time, she might have laughed at the audacity of it. Now, she met his gaze and shook her head.

“I believe that they believe. I have my own tales that the elders taught me. Andraste seems – strange. Far away.” Her brow furrowed. “Even the things they tell of her, it’s like they are dreaming of ideals rather than a real woman. They glorify her, rather than accept her for what she may have truly been.”

“Do you not do the same with your own gods?”

Unwittingly, she thought of Fen’Harel, the Dread Wolf. He was not glorified. Of anything, he was the opposite – the monster spoken of around campfires. The trickster god. _The elders warned me of Fen’Harel_, she thought. _How he hunted children who did not behave – who were more wolf than elf. I did not believe them._ What was faith worth, really, when it could be so varied and fragmented? _But they never said Fen’Harel was the wife of the Maker. They never said legions of righteousness would fall upon the world at his every command._

“It’s different,” she said at last. “You would not understand, _seth’lin_.” The word slipped from her lips without thought, cold and chapped though they were. He bore the brunt of it with a simple smile and shrug, as though he had heard the term many times before. Worn it with pride. He released her shoulders then – stood so that his shadow draped across her lap like a silken drape.

“Zevran,” he said lightly. “One day, perhaps, you and your friend will call me by that instead.” He reached for her hand again, lifted it to his lips – and when those lips grazed across her knuckles in a chaste sweep, she felt the sunlight burn from him into her. Light her at all her tips like a dozen candles. Then, he let her go. Her fingers trailed an invisible crescent through the air before they burrowed into her thigh, hiding in the thin meat that it was made up of. His smile did not diminish. Nothing could faze him, she realised. Not the warning teeth of jealousy, nor the harsh reprimand of any thinness of his blood. Whatever he had encountered in his life was far worse – anything beyond that, he would survive.

“Sleep sweet, herald,” he murmured. “If you will not believe in them, believe in yourself.”

Even after he departed, Niamh imagined he had left a shadow of himself, watching her. At last, however, she was not afraid of what phantoms loomed in the dark. In their stead, the thin-blood had left a flickering light of hope.


	22. XXII.

“_Soft Fade-touched light, in dream-lit tones, falls dark.  
Each form a memory, recalled through parted lips,  
That try to speak, fall silent. Before light marks  
The dawn, from sleeping fingers she slips  
Into the day, where averted eyes bend  
To any but the other. Oathsworn  
To Lion's call, yet here the two are broken.  
As waxing sickle stands witness to the end  
Of love's denial and secrets borne,  
From parted lips, the words at last are spoken._”

\- author unknown, from _Ameridan and the Mage_

Was she his lover?

These simple thoughts were the most effective in setting him to pacing at night, touring these rounded walls with their manifold murals, some of the pigments still in the process of drying and staining, yet to him only soft echoes of the history that had come to pass. Significant, in their hands. Significant in the world’s. When he swiped colour across stone, sometimes he felt the imposter – his an unworthy brush, his fingertips ash against something new-born and bright. Occasionally he felt the slicing impulse of scrubbing it all clean – maddening, really, until he centred and calmed himself. Let such tempestuous emotions run their course.

As spirits could be shackled and corrupted by the wanton influence of those who summoned them, he too wondered if this – this almost selfish _passion_ was thwarting his carefully laid plans, his surety of course. It was a distraction. _Should_ be a distraction, and nothing more. The same could be said of Lavellan. She had greater deeds of importance to pay heed to. Quick affairs of the heart in shadowed corners would not improve her health, nor her standing in the so many eyes trained upon her every move. Was it not ill omen enough that she was an elf, Dalish, summoned to a cause beyond her nature or belief? Should word spread that she held up some apostate as her lover, _elvhen_ too, then would her trials not be greater? Would not the quibbles of the world grow unbearably intolerant?

Already they whispered. Held her up like a broken doll for all the world to glower at. They had made a place for her upon a throne in the great hall of _Tarasyl’an Te’las_, a silken cushion to soften the press of her bone upon stone, as if to cloyingly cloak the hardship of taking command, _rule_ – for was that not a seat reserved for royalty? For a superior? Now, for a _herald_ – an innocent word, usually, but now implied to be greater than the constraints of monarchy, or even an empire.

_Empire._ It was in those days that her advisers congregated and murmured over the plot of an assassination against the Empress of Orlais. They sat the frail elf upon the throne, but the power seemed to lie, truly, in the laps of spymistress, commander, ambassador, and the stalwart Right Hand. When the herald was summoned to listen upon them, it was said that she was silent, that she watched but never spoke – that she sat straight as her new elegant Inquisitor’s staff, an onyx wolf’s head peering just as silently over her shoulder. The more she simply sat in silence, the more her advisers spoke for her. It was the same when she sat upon her throne, many small grievances brought before her as though she commanded a realm, not an organisation.

_She is overwhelmed_, Solas would think to himself just as frequently. _It is selfish of me to ask more of her. It is misguided. Is she my lover, truly?_ He cloistered himself in the round walls of murals. He pressed pigment over pigment, trying abundantly to render the colours as vividly as he remembered them to be. To breathe magic into stillness, life into memory. The elf who had saved her life, the one they called _crow_, watched her just as closely. He would stand with his shoulder against a pillar, his fingertips grazing his thoughtful, twisting lips. He watched her so closely, Solas felt the torches on the wall sear his eyelids, the centre of his chest, until he returned again to his isolation to scrub over the pigments, again, again, _again_.

Then, it was said that she began to speak. Softly, at first, from her throne, her eyes gazing past and through these _shem_ who came to petition her. _Why?_ she would ask first. And this would stop them in their words, pause them in their indignant stature, until there was quiet enough for her to form more words, soft yet heavy.

_Why should I help you?_

_ Would you help my people in my stead?_

_ Does this help us against Corypheus?_

_ Does this stand to help the world?_

It was said that her petitioners would grow flustered. Sometimes their pride would raise their voices. She never once looked at them, fully. She never once raised her own voice.

Then, it happened in her meetings with her advisers. She would look at a fixed point upon the wall and ask them, _Why?_

_ Would she help me in my stead?_

_ Do you know the history of my people in Orlais?_

_ Do you know the truth of the Dales?_

This time, pride did not raise their voices, but they would fall silent – uncomfortable, as is often the nature of those confronted with a truth that inconveniences them, but cannot be rightly denied. It is said that the ambassador would cough, twist the silk of her dress. The spymistress would watch, her lips thinned and thoughtful. The commander would stammer then fall quiet too. The Right Hand would seethe, but could not put justified word to her growing resentment of the waifish elf.

_Why?_ It became Lavellan’s word of power. Simple, cutting to the nerve. Solas watched the crow’s lips twist into a smile each time she spoke it.

“Why are you avoiding me?”

His hand froze, hovering over a ribbon of scarlet upon the wall, his brush tip darkened as if by the kiss of blood. She spoke her word of power, and his heart quickened for it. He felt his throat constrict like he was but a boy again. He felt himself blush, he cursed himself, he attempted wildly to centre himself. Niamh gave him no quarter, striding so close he could feel her breath upon his shoulder. _Emma lath_, he thought with deepening despair.

“Am I your lover?” she asked again. He could imagine her eyes staring through him, her words cool upon her lips. Yet when he turned to face her, she gazed _into_ him with burning intensity. Her jaw was set, determined. “You have loved me against the wall. You have loved me in my bed. What am I to you, Solas?”

“Lavellan … ”

“That is the name of my clan. You’ve known me intimately. Speak to me intimately.”

“_Da’vhenan_, why do you ask this?”

He could see how her teeth clenched, the skin of her freckled cheeks pulled taut over delicate bone-work. Her eyes burned, roiled, churned. “You look at me as if I died in the snow,” she forced out. “You look at me as if I’ll die in your arms. You look at me like you’re afraid to love me. The last I saw your heart, it was when you danced with me by the fire. You paint on the walls as though you’re afraid you’ll bleed out all your secrets if you don’t.”

He saw a dream in her. A dream of a girl, a young huntress, staring up at him in awe and fear as he paced through the forest, a hungry and gargantuan wolf. In the thread of his nightmares, the wolf – _him_ – set upon her with ravenous appetite. He devoured her until she bled in the grass, on the roots of gnarled trees. Until her guts ravelled around his paws, his teeth pierced through her heart. Her eyes milked over, her lashes frosted with the chill of death.

“You’ve come to me in my bed,” she continued. “You come to me in my dreams. You always come to me in my dreams. You always watch over me. Yet in life, you only come to me when you are desperate. When you have held yourself away for so long, you can’t bear it. Otherwise, I must come to you. I must watch you paint. I must watch you give more to the walls than you dare give to me.”

In the passage of years, her carcass would turn to bleached bone. Her clan would move away, shadowed by tragedy and grief. A conclave would erupt. The world would burn.

“I watched you die once,” she bit. “In a future where I did not exist. You rotted in a prison cell. You lost your heart. I lost you.”

When he visited this dream now, he begged the little huntress to run. He tried to take a longer route through the forest so that she did not see him, yet his path ever led back to her. He could not speak through the knives in his mouth, and she would always watch him, frozen in place. A gentle _halla_, an innocent girl. He did not need to devour her. Something had changed in her in that dream. Something had begun to eat her from the inside out. A fang lived perpetually lodged in her beating heart.

“Solas – ”

“I have been dishonest with you, _ma’arlath_.”

The words fled his lips. _This time_, he thought. _This time, she will know._ Yet, as he watched the relief pool through her pallid complexion, the line of her shoulders soften, he knew this, too, to be untrue. He knew he would pull at that fang, yet it would only lodge deeper. The colours on the walls fled onto his tongue, and out they came in fantastical hues, soft tragedies and the mantle of starlight.

His own heart fled deeper into the night.


	23. XXIII.

“_When Judicael I took the throne, he inherited the political turmoil left behind by his father, Reville the Mad, which had cost his brother, Etienne II, his life. In a bid to win over the nobles of his court, one of Emperor Judicael's first acts was the establishment of the Council of Heralds. The Council would be the final arbiter over all disputes involving titles – even having the power to overrule the word of the emperor on such matters._”

\- Sister Petrine, Chantry scholar, from _An Examination of Orlesian Government_

A girl sat on a throne at the deep end of a long, swallowing hall. Shadows moved and whispered between the pillars that held the ceiling at bay. Petitioners wandered before her, then drifted away just as uneasily. The Dalish felt like a ghost above man – a cloud that obscured the sun. They looked at her that way, the same way. They had begun to fear her, for her asking questions. For refusing to help for petty squabbles. For refusing to be what they had desired her to be all along.

But perhaps she was truly a cloud. No matter how she attempted to focus, her thoughts were sliced through by bitter memory. The cruelty of a man she loved telling her that love was not enough. That love would distract her. That he had been dishonest and foolish to think that he could make an exception for her – no, that _she_ could make an exception for _him_. And though Niamh Lavellan had never had her heart broken by another before, she had learnt that it was not some abrupt shattering that pierced your innards and rendered you pitiable. It was a slow, consuming poison. It broke into your mind and would not let you recall the last sweet taste you’d sampled. It wore you down until your hands shook frail and indecisive on the arms of a throne.

She pressed her fingers tightly into the metal arms. They had begun to emboss the throne with twining gold, wrought like flame. She felt as though she truly was wreathed by it, but instead of heat, the cold stifled her. _That is why I tremble so_, she thought stubbornly to herself. She gazed down the steps that led from her chair, counting the stones until the next pair of feet that would stand their ground before her. Then her gaze climbed up, and suddenly Niamh of clan Lavellan felt small, unworthy.

Shimaya stood before her, the butt of her spear planted firmly into the floor, her posture proud and steady. The dark of her eyes danced fiercely, and the set of her jaw would not be placated. She had always been the best huntress of their clan, and Niamh had always envied her that freedom – that strength of will and dominance to scour the forests as she wished, never to be cursed by the many eyes of the Dread Wolf. None had ever laughed at Shimaya. None had ever scorned her.

_But she scorned me_, the herald could not help but think. _She truly believed I was cursed by Fen’Harel. Somehow, she resented me, almost as much as I resented her. Would she have shot him down on sight? Brought his head triumphantly to the clan and made boast? Would they have believed her a mad girl, a bad omen, as much as they thought that of me?_ The silence lengthened. _I should speak_, Niamh thought. _No. Should_ she_ speak?_ How different they had become, the both of them. One sat upon an uncomfortably sharp throne, and the other was surrounded by the brunt of her contempt.

Shimaya’s lips parted.

“Why?”

Niamh had never paused to think what to answer if someone else should ask that of her. She blinked, no longer looking through her petitioner. Shimaya could not be ignored. She could never be ignored.

“Why?” she repeated. The best huntress of clan Lavellan dared steps closer, and when the soldiers of the Inquisition exchanged uneasy glances and reached for their weapons, Niamh sharply lifted her hand. No blade would be hefted against a Dalish elf here, not so long as she was placed upon a throne. If Shimaya thought better of her for it, her expression did not betray such.

“Why sit there? Why don’t you help? You speak for the Dalish, but you use our name in vain. You are afraid, Niamh of clan Lavellan, so-called _herald_.”

Shimaya’s words had always stung deep, but Niamh was no longer a little girl to be chided and laughed at beside her clan’s fire. It would do neither of them good to tear up and succumb to the turmoil which wrecked her mind. Though her hand continued to shake, she stubbornly brought it back down to the arm of her throne, feeling the twining gold threaten to slice into her skin.

“I ask why I should help, and they never answer. They would not do the same for us – ”

“What if they did?” Shimaya’s voice rang with such confidence, it drowned Niamh’s without effort. “If our camp had been put to the torch, what if they too had come to help? To save us?”

Niamh’s fingers twitched over the embossing gold. “You believe they would?” she asked softly – not out of denial, but surprise. They had always been mistrustful of outsiders, the both of them – _all_ of them. She had expected to be chided or berated, but not in this way. Shimaya settled back on her heels, content with her proximity, the toes of her sandals practically brushing the steps that led up to the herald’s throne.

“While you’ve sat here on your throne, or brooded in your chambers, I’ve braved the wilds with your agents. I’ve seen what conflict has wrought. Families torn asunder, farms abandoned, bodies left to rot in their own barns. You take the mages under your wing, but you do nothing to offer them solace. Your own soldiers resent them, rebuke them. Do you discipline them for that, herald?”

Instinctively, Niamh’s eyes searched the hall for Cullen, the commander of the Inquisition’s army. Instead, she received the stares of those who had come to call Skyhold home, or made room for themselves as though this were court, and they the enraptured audience. There were merchants as well as soldiers – even nobles in their Orlesian finery, ogling and waiting day after day to see how the herald might choose to favour the Empress. She felt a lump form in her throat.

“I wasn’t aware – ”

“You weren’t,” Shimaya agreed. “You will be aware of very little if all you do, day on day, is sit on that pretty throne. If you’re tired of listening to petty squabbles, tired of your inner circle plotting behind your back, then take your staff and walk into the wilds with me. Wander amongst those you would dare to rule over. Our Keeper never sat on a pretty chair and told us what to do, Niamh. She was our elder, yes, but our _equal_ – never a dictator.”

_She is right_, Niamh realised, even as her ears burned. _I envy her for her strength of will, for going wherever she may choose – but I can choose too. I’ve always been able to choose._

“I can’t speak for empresses,” Shimaya continued. “I can’t speak for whatever you’ve become. You are not the herald of Andraste to me. You are a sister. My clan-mate. You are _Dalish_. We Dalish do not wither away like a flower picked from the wilds. We _are_ the wilds.”

Carefully, slowly, Niamh lifted herself from the throne. She walked free of the stagnant flames that clung to the back of its seat, moving carefully down the steps until she was only a little taller than Shimaya. Her frail body shook, but sitting still would have never helped it. Brooding on a throne or brooding in her chambers would have never helped it. Wishing that her lover would return to her in her dreams, save her from the avalanche of snow that choked her in her nightmares, would never, ever help it.

“Sister,” she said, and reached out her hand. Though still she could not transcribe thought from the dark of Shimaya’s intense gaze, that her clan-mate mirrored her gesture was enough. Hand met hand, fingers twined round fingers. A simple grasp, yet it was much and more after stagnant, heartbroken solitude. It reminded Niamh of her purpose. Perhaps Solas was right – perhaps she _couldn’t_ afford to be distracted by him.

_We are the wilds_, Niamh thought, and she knew this to be true.


	24. XXIV.

“_Mastery of the self is mastery of the world._”

\- _The Risk of Saarebas_

There was a time, long ago, when Garrett Hawke would have taken comfort in being amongst strangers – unknown, unrecognised, nothing more to his name than a drive to better his family’s lot in life and his own in the process. Recognition would come with time, he’d often reasoned to himself. Patience was the key to success. And in the interim, in that comfortable middling ground where his face was as passable and nondescript as the man next to him, he could scheme and plot in peace, never too wary of the fact that his name might slip off the wrong tongue in the wrong place.

Now, he was still a stranger, but that fact could change at the flip of a coin. The world had grown far too small for his liking, nothing like the vast stretches of continent and ocean he had imagined as a child. Everything seemed too real and near. His name, his title, had a reach that could scrape the top of mountains.

He had stated his desire to help the Inquisition as clearly as he could, but even before he had met with the so-called herald of Andraste, he had had a mind of where to start. With Templars now roaming the land in droves through Corypheus’ will, whispers had abound of the red lyrium they exploited – the same lyrium that Hawke and Varric had encountered spreading its envenomed tendrils through the corruption of Kirkwall. He could try and tell himself that this wasn’t personally motivated – that he truly _was_ selflessly dedicating himself to the good of the Inquisition – but the man wryly knew that to be a half-baked lie.

In his pursuit of unearthing the facts surrounding the entity known as red lyrium, he had apparently attracted his current greatest arch-nemesis – _attention_. Turned out that a hooded man asking too many questions in what he _considered_ to be covert places was, well, too much of a luxury for Garrett Hawke to afford in the current day. So he was poised, alone at a table, in some tavern without a name, in the remnants of a village caught within crossfire. He had the heels of his boots upon a table, pondering if he would need to put them to good use, and what use that might _be_ – kicking or running, he was rather good at both. There was the likelihood he could pursue diplomacy instead, but – well, that seemed too farfetched for the Champion of Kirkwall.

Whoever it was had been good with an arrow, at any rate. It had pinned the invitation to the wall next to his head – a brilliant red feather to mark the spot.

Drowned in his thoughts though he may have been, he was not completely unaware of the different tables in the tavern filling up. The similar garb those people wore. The way they interacted politely with each other, yet held their eyes on him. Garrett Hawke made up his mind. _Kicking_, he decided. _Just a little bit, before the running._

Then, she slid into place before him. A well-travelled cloak settled quaintly over the silver of polished armour, her dark hair cropped short to frame her slender cheeks. Her eyes were darker still, boring into him with a gentle, cynical amusement. His own scoured her appearance, piecing the facts together. Immediately, the thought of using his heels in any shape or form, other than dragging them off the table, left him.

“You’re a Grey Warden.”

“Astute,” she answered, not missing a beat. “You’re a nosy bugger.”

“One ought to be well informed, in this day and age.”

“Certainly. Yet one also ought to be more careful, when they are the Champion of Kirkwall.”

_Bugger_, he thought dryly to himself. He chanced a glance around the tavern large, taking into account each unique visage, every lax demeanour. Not armed nor ready to trick him. Just a silent occupation. Intimidation? A show of arms? Or a show of value? “You’ve much experience, being the champion?” he asked in throwaway nonchalance, stalling for time. He was greeted with a delighted laugh. Yes – _delighted_. She seemed positively thrilled by everything around her. Where he had taken his feet from the table, she very suddenly and, admittedly, in a not very lady-like way, hefted her own onto the scarred wooden surface.

“In a manner of speaking. But we differ greatly, you and I. Not necessarily in the ways that matter.”

“What ways are those, pray tell?”

“Red lyrium. I’ve an idea the answers we’re seeking lead to the same place. So, I thought, what harm would making an ally do?”

His eyes darted around the room again. “By the looks of things, you aren’t particularly lacking in those.”

“No. But Corypheus isn’t lacking an army, is he?”

His gaze came to a pause back onto the Grey Warden. She was too at ease, he decided, and this made him wary. “What happened to your fellows?” he asked brusquely. “The other wardens?” The question brought a sharp glint into her smouldering eyes, though it did little else to affect her commanding posture.

“As I said – ideas and answers. I’m not a charlatan here to rob you blind, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

_No_, he thought to himself. _I hadn’t wondered about that._ She exuded many airs, and charlatan was not one of them. Nor was Grey Warden, even if the sigil on the shield resting by her knee boasted her as one of their ilk – even if her armour was battle-tested, and the steel in her eyes was sharper than the sword at her hip. Not the archer he had been looking for, then, but it seemed she had friends in many places. Charisma enough to wield them as further accessories. “You’re aware of who I am,” he stated, side-stepping her proposed illusion altogether. The corner of her mouth ticked up, sly.

“You’re very recognisable. The stripe of red across your nose does the trick. What inspired that?”

“It’s a reminder.”

“For what, exactly?”

“How much blood even the best of intentions can shed,” he answered flatly. “The sort of morose thought that inspires me to operate quietly, without calling attention to myself. With all due respect, if you intended to become my ally, you’ve started off on a very bad foot.”

In time, the warden scraped her feet off of the table, replacing them with her elbows instead. A sombre expression overtook the initial spark of adrenaline, and a gentle hush fell over the occupied tavern. Their audience was hanging on every word.

“You’ll find I’m very discreet, Messere Hawke. As are my companions. Are you well acquainted with the Friends of Red Jenny?”

“Their name is familiar, though I find it passing strange, again, that a Grey Warden would choose their company over that of her own ilk.”

“Another question, then. Are you familiar with the Calling?”

Glimpses of thick tomes and dusty pages filled the back of his mind; the old nostalgic sensation of callused fingertips scraping over weathered vellum. Terms and vague definitions, all so distant at the time from his own reality. Garrett gently tilted his head.

“A beckoning towards your end, to summarise. Do you hear it?”

“To coincide with Corypheus’ grand awakening, yes. And it seems I’m far from the only one. I’ve uncovered – disturbing rumours. If they are true, even remotely, they cannot be forgiven. Given your prior history, I think you would agree with me.”

“I’m assuming you won’t give me any thorough answer until I agree to your offer of kinship.”

“I want to know if you are to be trusted.” Her eyes bore into his. “I want to know if the Inquisition can be trusted.”

Nothing evaded the knowledge of the Grey Warden. He had heard near mythic tell of her kind, those warriors who devoted their lives, their entire legacies, to the noble intent of keeping Thedas safe from darkspawn. He had imagined striking, heroic figures. Humble, yet stalwart demeanours. Not this sly cunning. Not this unsettling know-how, nor the manipulative charisma. Garrett found himself just as curious of if _he_ could trust _her_, though now he thought this display may well be both for intimidation _and_ for diplomacy. What choice did that leave him? She seemed a woman intent on getting her way. A woman used to it, in fact.

Well. There was only one answer for it, then. No kicks, no grand escape into the night. He had volunteered for this, stuck his neck out of perfectly apt hibernation to put the dirty title of _champion_ to good use. Backing out now would make Varric happy, but it would do little to fix the state of the world.

“Trust me,” he answered her. He matched the unsettling intensity of her gaze with his own, and threw in a half-smile for good measure. Perhaps her daring was infectious. “I’m sure you’ve made worse decisions in your life.” The warden watched him for a moment longer, and then bared her teeth in a grin both handsome and wicked. It certainly wasn’t an expression he would soon forget.

“Oh, darling,” she drawled, “you have _no_ idea.”


	25. XXV.

“_Loss of the self is the source of suffering._”

_\- The Risk of Saarebas_

Losing her, Solas found, was unlike any pain he had ever known. That statement in and of itself had the potential to be trite, as much as the sentiment tortured him with its melancholy. What _is_ pain, after all, and had he any right to be entitled to its myriad teeth? If those teeth belonged to a wolf, then surely he had the power, the strength of will inside of him, to bare his own and fight back – press fang and molar to the hovering beast’s throat, rejoice again in the spill of blood that wet his tongue like an old, terrible friend? Losing her was the burn of a fire at the end of a snowy mountain pass. Losing her was the bitter dregs of tea in a cup he could not savour.

_No._ No, Solas thought. _That_ was trite. Uncouth. Comparing her to flickering light, fleeting – to dregs of damned _tea?_ His fingers curled inward, biting into his palms in sharp, merciless crescents.

He watched her shift from a wilting flower upon her throne to a storm within a meadow. Bedecked in fresh armour, a wolf’s head staff as her constant companion, the Inquisitor spent more of her time in the wilderness now than she did in the fortress proper. When they were separated, he could feel her dreams just an arm’s reach away. Initially, he resisted the pull of curiosity. To be distant from her was the ideal outcome. Polite colleagues, at best, yet no more than that. He had as little right to her inner thoughts as he did the like of Varric’s, or Sera’s, or any of those adventurers who drew shy of naming him _friend_.

Would that he could resist. Would that he could attune himself, again, to the simplicity of solitude. Now an ancient loneliness had been broken, cracked apart like the bruised skin of fruit to let the juices beneath run free. He followed the rivers to her, unconsciously. When he tossed and turned, it was all too easy to slip betwixt the lines of trees that separated his sleeping thoughts from her own.

She still dreamt of the wolf across the river. She would stand and watch him, critical, cool, before she turned away. Her determination toward her duty carried her feet far, even as she left behind the ghost of a girl, still afraid. He would stop by that girl, and he could see the whispers of the steel woman she would become. Her heart hardened to the jeers of her peers, her eyes set toward a horizon she could not recognise but was certain would come. He found himself wondering what she had hoped for – what future she had pictured for herself outside of her clan. She had always longed for an escape, he knew. She had always been searching for a way to embrace her fate as an outsider, even as she feared it. In that same way, he knew that a part of her revelled in the position of power she held. The seat of _Inquisitor_ – it was a crown of brambles, but a crown nonetheless. A celebration of her _otherness_, rather than a rebuke.

_But they _will_ rebuke you, vhenan. The thorns will dig beneath your skin. They will make you bleed for them. You will become their lamb._ He could near laugh at himself for the hypocrisy. Had he not made her his own lamb? Unwitting, unrealising. He had made her bleed in his own way, a viscous break deep beneath her ribs. That wound had dealt her a greater blow than any rock thrown her way. _It was for you. It was a kindness. Would you forgive me for that?_

A velvet blackness passed before his gaze. A shuffle of wings as a crow sat upon the ground before him, cocking its head, dark beady eyes analysing him, seeing deep into his marrow. Solas fought the sudden urge to snap his maw, to capture the bird’s skull against the inside of his jowl. He was too proud to stoop to such aggression – too chastened to enact such violence within a dream that was not his own. The crow parted its beak and laughed at him, casting up into the air. A swirl of feathers spun about Solas’ head, tickling the slope of his brow.

The Antivan elf followed at her elbow, whether he was conscious of the choice or not. He had been too restless to be contained within stone walls, so he set out into the wilds with her – accompanied by the rest, her newly formed court. The Tevinter mage, the solemn Grey Warden, the _Madame de Fer_ – but he was her shadow, and she stood proud to have him elongate behind her. Where Solas dared not taint her earth with his inner violence, they spun a gruesome dance together, banishing demons, casting aside ruptures between Templar and mage. In her dreams, their sleeves dripped with blood together, and they created their own twining red river.

He watched, like a predator in the dark. He feared that the crow would peck at her throat until it was only flapping skin and glistening ruby. He feared that the knives he wielded would press against her spine – his curling smile his second mask, his true intention to betray her all along. He wrestled with his heart, wondering again if he only believed this because he was jealous – because he longed to live the life of a crow, flying free, darting from master to master, never a master of himself.

Then she turned and saw him watching her from the trees. Her brow twitched, a dash of uncertainty in her newfound confidence. Her corvid companion melted away, the emerald fields of the Hinterlands, the bubbling of rivers. Everything faded until there was only the inky black of confusion, the distance between him and her. Though there was no light left to linger, the onyx wolf head at her shoulder shone and glowered in defensive posture.

“Why are you following me?” she asked him, and when he looked down, his dark paws burrowed into the shadowed earth, pulling back. _Wolves do not run_, he thought in bemusement. She stepped nearer to him. The sound of her approach reminded him of the day she had confronted him, reached for him, and he had – “Solas?”

_How does she know?_ He stared at her with a vacant vulnerability, a lingering regret. He should not have come here. He should not have crossed the line between their dreams. She reached out, her pale hand lingering inches from his great, sloping snout. Her fingertips quivered in the cool air, then she steadied them. Her cheeks sucked inward with concentration.

“You were there,” she murmured, almost in reverence. “You guided me through the snow and through the dark. You led me to safety.”

His hind legs dragged back. He bared his teeth, a flash of fang to warn her to stay away – not to touch, not to entertain the dark. She was unfazed. She had faced greater demons to date, she thought. He was only a wolf, she thought.

_Do you not recognise me, lethallan? My true self?_ His eyes flicked over her body, and as they did, their ruby glow seemed to shed their colour into the translucence of her skin. The breath caught in her throat. The throes of a nightmare crept up her calves, snaring her in place, bringing her to that familiar prison of despair – of terrible, guttural realisation. _I am sorry_, he thought. _I have made you believe that I saved you from your nightmares. All along, I was the one who brought them._

“You aren’t him,” Niamh snapped. “_Ma harel lasa!_ Begone! You do not frighten me, Fen’Harel! _Leave!_”

He dragged himself backward, yet for some reason she chased him – snapped at him like a smaller wolf, fierce, desperate. Her fingers bunched in his midnight fur, tugging, scraping.

“Is this how you’ve cursed me, you fiend? Have you taken him from me too? Will I never be happy? Will you always be following in my shadow?”

He felt something burn at the red of his eyes – a choking deep within his chest. He growled, and she growled back. She fell to her knees before him, pounding her fists into his ethereal flesh. Soon, she was wailing, her voice ruptured and broken.

“_I hate you_,” she keened into his fur. Her forehead pressed to his shaggy flank, her grip weakening until it ceased its tugging altogether. Warmth spread from where her tears soaked into the dark gathered about his being. “I hate you. Will you never leave me alone? Will you never?”

He would leave, but she remained pressed against him. His heart beat out of his chest. It was a pain like he had never known – he had known greater, he was sure, but nothing so bitter. Nothing so singularly piercing. Once, he had been lonely. Could he ever truly be alone again, now that he had known her?

“Why did you save me?” she whimpered. “You awful thing. You should have left me to die.”

_ No. Never._

“Do you not understand, you brute? I’m best left. Do you understand?”

_ I am sorry. I am sorry for leaving you._

“Will you not go, then?” Her crimson-rimmed eyes glowered at him from above his tufts of hair, yet there was desperation behind her ugly anger. A need that carved a hollow into his stomach. “Will you be the one who will not leave me, even after everyone else? If you are my shadow, I suppose I will never be alone. Will I?”

_ Perhaps that is our truth. We will never leave one another, no matter how far – no matter how great the rift. I will always come to your dreams. I will always be your nightmare, and you will always be mine._ She could not hear him, and so the thought gave him no solace. No matter how widely he bared his fangs, words would not form off his tongue. Finally, she came to rest her face against his fur. Her fingertips had begun to quake again, her forgiving them their misdeed.

“So it will be, then,” she whispered. “You, my dark wolf – and I, your cold moon.”

He could not give her words, but he could give her his body. He could twine himself around her, her thawed and sleeping form. He could shield her in his tear-stained shag, and when he closed his eyes, he could cast her in darkness – none-seeing, but not alone. Never alone, never truly.

_ You, my cold moon; I, your dark wolf._

Silence embraced them both, in the end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> art by me.
> 
> **[art twitter](https://twitter.com/__mononoke) | [art tumblr](https://mono-no-ke.tumblr.com/) | [art instagram](https://www.instagram.com/__mononoke)**


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